Better Nutrition With Homemade Soup By Gretchen Scalpi, Rd, Cde

Many of my clients tell me how much they like having soup for lunch in the colder months, but most of the time, they name off various brands of soups bought at the store. Don't get me wrong: many commercial soups are great options for the calorie conscious. The problem with canned soups, of course, is the sodium content. Some products have an excess of 1,000 mg of sodium per serving. To my way of thinking, this is far too much salt for one simple food item. So while it's easy to turn to grocery store shelves for your lunchtime soup, consider making your own soup.

The beauty of homemade soup is that you can literally take any basic soup recipe and modify it based on ingredients you have on hand. You can make adjustments and get the sodium content reduced without foregoing good taste. Most soups start with a stock, broth, or a vegetable base. You can make your own stock if you have the time, but starting with a ready made broth can cut down on preparation time. If you buy ready made soup broth, I recommend that you read the labels carefully. Regular broth will make your homemade version of soup just as high in sodium as canned soup. The low sodium versions of broth have sodium too! I found that most of the "low sodium" brands of broth had close to 500 mg. sodium per serving. This is still too much if you are sodium conscious. I found several organic low sodium stocks with just 140 mg. per serving, so it pays to look around.

If you want to try making homemade soup for your lunches, here's an idea: make one batch pot of a different soup every week. Keep enough of the soup on hand for one or two meals, and then freeze the rest in smaller containers, preferably 1-2 portion containers. If you make a different kind of soup each week, you will soon have a "selection"of different soups in your freezer that you can choose from for a quick lunch or dinner meal. Take a single serving of frozen soup to work and you'll have a nice healthful meal ready to heat up.

Here is my favorite vegetable soup recipe:

Vegetable Barley Soup

2 Tb. olive oil

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup diced carrots

12 oz. fresh mushrooms chopped

1/2 cup barley (use pearl or hulless barley)

6 cups low sodium beef, chicken or vegetable broth

1/2 tsp coarse salt

2-3 cups chopped spinach, kale or Swiss chard

Heat oil in large pot and saut? onions and carrots until tender. Add mushrooms and cook for another 2 minutes. Add barley, low sodium broth and salt. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to simmer until barley is done. (Pearl barley takes about 40 minutes; hulless barley takes about 60 minutes to cook). Add chopped greens and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Serves 6.

? 2013 Gretchen Scalpi. All rights reserved. You are free to reprint/republish this article as long as the article and byline are kept intact and all links are made live.

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Many People Do Not Comprehend The Necessity Of Proper Nutrition By Sheree Sonne

As you continue to read you'll be pleased to realize that we will be speaking about the importance of nutrition whether individuals are dieting or not.

Carbohydrates are generally one of the first things which dieter's will wind up eliminating from their daily routine. These men and women don't recognize that carbohydrates are the primary source of energy for an individual's body. Many men and women end up becoming very tired and lethargic by not consuming carbohydrates, but these carbohydrates can reverse this. Obviously this is something which will have to be limited, mainly because if you eat way too much carbohydrates it'll be stored inside your body as fat. Obviously in relation to eating carbohydrate you want to try and do this in the healthiest way possible, through fruits and vegetables.

Protein is yet another one of those items that you are going to have to consume each day in order to maintain a healthy body. Something about protein is that it can be quite important to be able to help you maintain your muscle mass, and it can also help in repairing tissues. Protein is additionally used to be able to help individuals create hormones that are going to end up being vital to your state of health. As many of you are aware there a lot of various kinds of meats that a particular person can consume and the majority of these are packed with protein. There are a number of vegetables that contain a good deal of protein but you are going to also see that nuts and peanut butter will be a good choice as well.

One more thing a lot of individuals try and eliminate from their diet are fats, but fats are an essential part of a healthy and nutritious diet. In relation to these different fats you are going to find that they are split into two categories, unsaturated fats and saturated fats. The fats which are not good for your body and can actually lead to different types of health problems are the fats generally known as saturated fats. The unsaturated fats that you can find in foods are actually a healthy option.

Getting enough vitamins and minerals is another thing that you're going to need, and this is primarily because all of the organs inside your body need these to function properly. Veggies and fruits will be able to offer you almost all the minerals and vitamins your body requires every single day. You are going to see that just about every vitamin and mineral you are going to require for your body is going to be found in various fruits and vegetables. With regards to the actual amount of fruits and veggies you should be eating every day, you need to understand that it's no longer three servings a day but five.

By making certain you're eating the correct kinds of foods you are going to see that you'll be able to have a much healthier body.

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