How to Eat Healthy During the Holidays

Get easy-to-use tips for keeping your focus on healthy eating and not overindulging over the holidays from National Jewish Health Cardiologist, Andrew Freeman, MD.

Transcript

One of the best things I always hear about is the holiday season and how it brings people together and their families come in from out of town and everyone is able to celebrate, and I love that.

But, I also caution people that it’s a great time to overindulge and sometimes you don’t even realize you are doing it, right.

Every time you go to a Christmas or holiday function, there’s cookies and there’s cheeses, and there’s all sorts of meats and delicacies and everything else and whether or not you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever it may be, everybody brings a feast to every single event.

So be careful not to overindulge and do your best to try to eat more plants during this time period.

So become friends with the fruit and veggie tray rather than the meat and cheese spread.

Remember, that one little cube of cheese or that one little cube of a processed meat can have loads and loads of salt and calories, whereas handfuls of carrots, celery, cucumbers, whatever it is you like to eat has much less calories.

So fill up before you go to these parties, eat mostly fruits and vegetables to stay full and eat those at the parties and only indulge a small amount, so that way you don’t gain a lot of weight and get a lot of salt and get a lot of calories and potentially bad foods.

The bad news is, processed red meats now have been labeled by the World Health Organization as cancer causing as cigarettes and the centerpiece for many of these functions is ham or some sort of beef dish.

Be careful that you don’t eat too much or any of it because it could potentially lead to a problem down the road.

Visit njhealth.org/cardiology for more information.