We love to stock up for winter, but that doesn’t mean you need to store excessive fat in your body for winter too. We understand that as the temperature drops, you always get tempted to warm your belly with rich macaroni and cheese and creamy soup, but this winter, why not try to get that toasty feeling from superfoods? Time to power your body through cold weather!
Oatmeal
A bowl of oatmeal is a great hunger stopper. It gives you a dose of fibre together with plant-based protein. Oatmeal also contains a powerful starch called beta-glucan. Research found that just 3 grams a day of the beta-glucan in oats may reduce your bad cholesterol levels by 5 to 10%.
Hot chocolate
Hot chocolate is the ultimate winter beverage. Once the cooler weather arrives, we crave for that hot cocoa. The healthiest to have it is to melt two squares of dark chocolate and stir it into regular or almond milk as dark chocolate contains flavonoids, a type of antioxidant thought to reduce the damage caused by free radicals, potential instigators of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Black bean soup
There’s nothing like a soup with cumin and chili pepper to heat you up when things get cold. The nutrition star of this dish, though, is the beans. Black beans are a good source of iron and copper. Unlike animal protein sources, black beans contain almost no saturated fat and their black skins contain higher levels of the disease-fighting antioxidants than any other type of bean. So sipping on this soup will help your muscles use more oxygen and boost your immune system.
Pumpkin soup
What is more iconic in fall and winter than pumpkin? Rich in vitamin A, pumpkin is great for boosting vision. In a serving of pumpkin soup, you can be getting more than a day’s worth of this vitamin from the puree. Pumpkin also has antioxidant properties that are thought to have cancer-fighting powers.
