A few tips on healthy eating

If your aim is to lose weight and also enhance your all round well-being, among other things you really should follow a thoughtfully planned healthy-minded dietary regime. In a perfect world, this ought to include five helpings of grains and vegetables every day and take in the right proportion of nutrients.

Some low carb diet pointers:
* Know what is in your food Don't believe the food label that boasts to be 'low carb' - check the nutritional information figures on the back of the product. Some are only a little lowered and in some instances still higher than a competitors standard brand. In addition, beware of 'low sugar' and 'low fat' labels - 'low sugar' does not always mean 'low carb' - usually the carbs are just the same.

* Use reduced carb chocolate bars for cookies and muffins. If you have converted your favorite chocolate chip cookie or chocolate muffins recipe using soy flour, you really don't want to put in those high carbohydrate chocolate chips. Break up a reduced carb choccie bar into tiny chunks and use that as an alternative.

Lycopene superfoods
(includes grapefruit, red bell peppers and tomato sauce)

The nutrient lypcopene is a non-synthetic compound used to color foods and one of the carotenid family. It is the reason for the deep red colour of a good number of fruits and vegetables.

Fortunately, unlike numerous nutritional compounds, this useful phytochemical not only survives being cooked, but is noticeably increased in efficacy by cooking.

. Its most valuable theraputic value is that it serves as an antioxidant and appears to be an asset in the fight to lower the probabilty of developing cancer.

It is the most efficacious carotenoid quencher of singlet oxygen, which is linked with aging of the skin. It is also thought by many researchers to curtail the progression of atherosclerosis.