How beautiful is your breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? Is it full of color, or is it mostly plain, drab and white? In Ecuador, and in many other countries, typical meals are made up of primarily white ingredients. Eating more colorful meals is a simple way to include more vitamins and minerals in the diet and improve your health. Because I love this idea of eating the rainbow, I have designed my own rainbow as a guide on all of the recipes on this site and in my new cookbook.

Let me share the tips from another Sano por lo come program to help you create a more beautiful and balanced diet that increases our defenses. Below listen to the program and the tips (plus a few more) that I shared with the radio audience.

How to eat the rainbow and increase your defenses

Deep orange and green fruits and vegetables are high in vitamins and minerals. Try to include in your diet more orange foods such as carrots, butternut squash, tangerines and mangos, and green foods such as broccoli, spinach, Swiss chard and green peppers.
Orange fruits that we find in Ecuador, for example papaya, tangerines, “taxos/curumbas” (a passionfruit), golden berries “uvillas” and mangos, have many more vitamins than white fruits, like apples and pears.
Purple produce is high in anti-oxidants. Color your plate with good quantities of red cabbage, purple berries (“mortiños” and “moras”), purple sweet potatoes (“camotes”).
The most important tip is to eat lots of different colors in every meal and every snack. Picture this gorgeous plate of colors: blackened fish with amaranth, purple or orange sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, green pesto and blueberries for dessert.