Tips to Healty Eating

*Breakfast fills your "empty tank" to get you going after a long night without food. Eating a good breakfast can help you do better in school. Easy to prepare breakfasts include: cold cereal with fruit and low-fat milk, whole-wheat toast with peanut butter, yogurt with fruit, whole-grain waffles or even last night's pizza.
*Snacks are a great way to refuel. Choose snacks from different food groups - a glass of low-fat milk and a few graham crackers, an apple or celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins, or some dry cereal. If you eat smart at other meals, cookies, chips, and candy are okay for occasional snacking.
*You don't have to give up foods like hamburgers, french fries, and ice cream to eat healthfully. You just have to be smart about how often and how much of them you eat. Your body needs nutrients like protein, carbohydrates, fat, and many different vitamins and minerals such as vitamins C and A, iron, and calcium from a variety of foods.These foods give you carbohydrates for energy, plus vitamins, minerals, and fibre. Besides, they taste good! Try breads such as whole-wheat, bagels, and pita. Spaghetti and oatmeal are also in the grain group.
*A healthy eating style is like a puzzle with many parts. Each part, or food, is different. Some foods may have more fat, sugar or salt, while others may have more vitamins or fibre. There is a place for all these foods. What makes a diet good or bad is how foods fit together. Balancing your choices is important. Fit in a higher-fat food, like pepperoni pizza, at dinner by choosing lower-fat foods at other meals. And don't forget about moderation. If two pieces of pizza fill you up, don't eat a third.

10 good reasons to eat more local, seasonal food:

· to reduce the energy (and associated CO2 emissions) needed to grow and transport the food we eat

· eating local protects us from bio-terrorism

· to avoid paying a premium for food that is scarcer or has travelled a long way

· locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen

· to support the local economy

· to reconnect with nature's cycles and the passing of time

· seasonal food is fresher and so tends to be tastier and more nutritious

· local food just plain tastes better

· local food translates to more variety

· supporting local providers supports responsible land development

Six Reasons Why We Should Eat Organic Food

1. Protect Future Generation
Children receive four times the exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. The food choice you make now will impact your child's health in the future.

2. Save Energy
Farms have changed drastically in the last three generations, from the family based small businesses dependent on human energy to large scale factory farms highly dependent on fossil fuels. Modern farming methods uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country's total energy supply. More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate, and harvest all the crops in the United States. Organic farming is still mainly based on labour-intensive practices such as weeding by hand and using green manures and crop covers rather than synthetic inputs. Organic produce also tends to travel a shorter distance from the farm to your plate.

3. Keep Chemicals off Your Plate
Many pesticides approved for use by the EPA were registered before extensive research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases had been established. Now the EPA considers that 60% of all herbicides, 90% of all fungicides and 30% insecticides are carcinogenic. A 1987 National Academy of Sciences report estimate that pesticides might cause an extra 1.4 million cancer cases among Americans over their lifetimes. The bottom line is that pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms, and can also be harmful to humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage and genetic mutation.

4. Support a True Economy
Although organic food might seem more expensive than conventional foods, conventional food prices do not reflect hidden cost borne by taxpayers, including nearly $74 billion in federal subsidies in 1988. Other hidden costs include pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal and clean up, and environmental damage.

5. Promote Biodiversity
Mono cropping is the practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year. While this approach tripled farm production between 1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing amounts.

6. Taste Better Flavour
There's a good reason many chefs use organic foods in their recipes. They taste better. Organic farming starts with the nutrients of the soil which eventually leads to the nourishment of the plant and ultimately our palates.