Healthy Eating Explained: Root Vegetables Can Fight Fatigue and Increase Strength

You are what you eat. Despite our familiarity with this age-old adage, how many of us actually live by its wisdom? If you want to be strong and vibrant (Read: Not fatigued, lifeless, and frequently yawning), you need to eat foods that impart strength. Maintaining a strong body is the surest and most natural way of warding off illness, and below you'll find excellent tips about what foods can make you stronger and provide you with an increased sense of vitality.

There are several foods that anyone interested in increased health and well-being should incorporate into their diets. Root vegetables are a great example of foods that can impart strength. Root vegetables include potatoes, onions, carrots, and turnips. They also include lesser known vegetables such as daikon root, a member of the radish family. Root vegetables are rich in potassium, beta carotene, and other essential vitamins and minerals. Whenever possible, always purchase organic root vegetables. Because root vegetables lay very close to the ground, they are at greater risk for having pesticide residue which makes it so important to choose organic whenever available.

Christina Pirello host of the popular cooking show Christina Cooks praises root vegetables for their ability to impart strength. "A root vegetable can break a thick rock in its path," is a phrase she has said on her show on more than one occasion. And many holistic healthcare practitioners agree. Conventional practitioners typically refrain from giving any specific diet advice beyond the ambiguous, "Eat healthily." Most mainstream doctors rarely provide sound nutritional guidance to their patients. A patient recovering from heart surgery might be told it is okay to eat eggs once a week. There's rarely any mention that at the very least the eggs should be organic. Conventional healthcare practitioners are lacking in knowledge about nutrition and diet because they strive to treat illness through the suppression of symptoms via pharmaceuticals not through the simple, yet powerful, means of dietary and lifestyle changes.

Relax! It's much easier than you think to incorporate root vegetables into your diet. You can add diced daikon (usually available at natural food stores and some high-end grocery stores) to salads in place of red radishes. Add daikon to a stir-fry. If you can't find daikon root locally, then definitely include radishes in your diet, a vegetable cousin of daikon. Carrot juice can be blended with mangos to create a surprisingly delicious smoothie. Think chopped carrots in place of high-calorie potato chips for an afternoon snack.