Welcome to The Fresh Recipe blog! 

A blog about nutrition and all of your favorite recipes with fresher and healthier ingredients!

Nutrients should come primarily from foods. Foods such as fruits and vegetables contain not only the vitamins and minerals that are important for our health, but also other naturally occurring substances that may help protect you from chronic diseases. 

Making Better Choices

We all know that "eating less" is hard. Your body really wants those extra calories in that pizza or that ice cream-- and we live in a world where food is everywhere and there is a lot of it! Now days it's you against all of those fast food places, trying to win you over with their latest creation. To win a war against food, it is important to learn more about what you're eating.

The 4 Steps of the Better Choices Diet:

1. Make a daily record of everything you eat. Making a record of your diet is a very tedious task if you're using paper and pencil, but it's very easy to do with the My Tracking feature of My ND. Please read the My Tracking Help page to learn how to track and analyze your intake.
2. Determine which foods contribute the most Calories to your diet. The primary focus of the Better Choices Diet is to gradually replace some of the foods that you now eat with other foods that are more supportive of your goals. It makes sense to start with those foods that are contributing the most calories to your diet, since this is most likely to have the greatest positive impact on your progress. This step is automated with My Tracking. The tracking report that it generates includes a listing of all foods that you consumed, along with the percentage of calories that each supplied to your diet.
3. Make Better Choice substitutions for those foods. For each item on your tracking report, you'll also find links to Better Choice substitutions. Select your goal (weight loss, optimum health, or weight gain), and click on the link to explore the resulting list of foods. It's not important to choose foods that appear highest on the list—simply choose any of these foods that you would enjoy eating.
4. Repeat. Your goal is to gradually evolve your diet to include more nutritious and filling foods and less unhealthy and unsatisfying foods. Over time, as you incorporate more of these foods into your diet, the total calories that you consume will drop, and the overall nutrient density of your meals will increase.

Read More http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/better-choices-diet#concept#ixzz1yrl8PEJg

Featured Recipe

Spinach & Chicken Sausage Pizza

Since fresh tomatoes aren’t in season this time of the year and pre-made marinara sauce is often loaded with sodium, canned diced tomatoes with no added salt are a healthy solution – and they taste sweet and flavorful all year round. Plus, your body is better able to absorb the antioxidant lycopene in processed and canned tomato varieties.

By Julie O'Hara | Photo: Edward Pond

• Recipe
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Serves: 6
Hands-on time: 15 minutes.
Total time: 25 minutes.

CATEGORY:
Under 45 Minutes

INGREDIENTS:

• 6 oz spinach leaves
• 1 14.5-oz can, no-salt-added diced tomatoes, drained
• 1 whole-wheat thin pizza crust (such as Boboli 12” 100% Whole Wheat Thin Crust or CE's Whole-Wheat Pizza Dough)
• 2 fully cooked, all-natural, deli chicken sausages, sliced into 1/4-inch thick pieces
• 3 oz part-skim mozzarella cheese, grated (about 3/4 cup)

PANTRY STAPLES:

• Olive oil cooking spray
• Ground black pepper, to taste

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 450°F.
2. Coat a skillet with cooking spray and heat on medium low. Add spinach and cook until wilted, about 4 minutes. Season with pepper, to taste. Remove from heat and set aside.
3. Place 1 cup tomatoes in a fine mesh strainer and press out as much liquid as possible. Spread tomatoes onto pizza crust. Top with spinach, sausage and mozzarella. Bake 10 minutes, or until sausage is lightly browned and cheese is melted. Rest pizza on a cutting board for 5 minutes, slice into 6 equal pieces and serve.