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It’s grilled fish, mashed potatoes and steamed green beans and carrots for dinner again. Lunch was the usual – a chicken salad sandwich from your favourite deli while, for breakfast, you ate the low-fat, iron-enriched muesli you eat every day. For snacks, you’ve packed a banana and, if you buy juices or coffee, it will be orange or apple and decaf latte. Sounds healthy, right? And it is, unless you’ve fallen into a food rut. Sure, you may think your diet is healthy because you always buy the “right” foods like lean meat or fish, fruit, veges and wholegrains. But always buying the same things, from the same deli, the same supermarket, or even the same fish shop or butcher means you’re increasing your risk of vitamin and mineral deficiencies as well as increasing your likelihood of being exposed to certain chemicals and toxins, says nutritionist Jane Barnes, of Foodsense. “Variety, in what you buy and even where you shop, is the key to good health,” she says. In fact it’s now widely believed that people who eat at least 20 different biological food types every week tend to be healthier than those with a less varied diet. It seems vitality depends to a large part on a careful balance of at least 50 nutrients including 13 known vitamins, 15 minerals, 24 amino acids and two essential fatty acids and the best way to get all of these is to eat as many different fruit, veges, wholegrains and lean proteins as possible.
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