How to eat healthier

• Enjoy a variety of colourful vegetables
• Include vegetables at breakfast, lunch and dinner (and as snacks) to help get the recommended five or more serves of vegetables each day
• Choose vegetables that are in season as they are often cheaper and tastier
• Include salads or steamed vegetables on the side of meals
• Use frozen and tinned vegetables as they can be just as nutritious as fresh vegetables. Try steaming some frozen vegetables as a side or adding to stir-fry, soup or casserole
• Use canned vegetables, legumes/beans (with no added salt or reduced salt). Bulk up pasta sauces, soups, stews or Mexican dishes with lentils and beans
• Halve the amount of mince used in dishes like bolognese, shepherd’s pie, or meatballs, and replace with tinned legumes or beans and finely chopped or grated carrot, celery and zucchini
• Chop vegetables ahead of time and store them in the fridge. Munch on them with hummus or other legume or nut dip for a quick, tasty and healthy snack
• Keep vegetables interesting – try different cooking methods such as steaming, grilling, baking, barbecuing or stir-frying with a small amount of oil.

Eating more vegetables and legumes/beans

• Enjoy a wide variety of colourful and fresh fruit
• Buy fruits that are in season as they are generally cheaper, fresher and tastier
• Take a piece of fruit when going out for a cheap and convenient snack on hand
• If choosing to have dessert, try a fruit and dairy-based dessert such as fresh fruit with Greek yoghurt.
• Slice and freeze fruit ahead of time. Frozen banana slices, orange slices and grapes make fun and delicious snacks
• If choosing to drink fruit juice (choose the no added sugar variety), enjoy it only sometimes and in small amounts (1 serve = 1/2 cup or 125mls)
• Blend frozen bananas in a high-powered blender for a fruity, high fibre, ice-cream alternative.

Eating more fruit

Eating more wholegrain and high fibre cereals helps increase fibre in the diet. Fibre is important for digestion, heart health and to keep the body feeling fuller for longer.

• Look for words like ‘wholegrain’ or ‘wholemeal’ on packets when buying grain (cereal) foods such as bread, pasta and breakfast cereal
• Check the nutrition information panel on the back of grain (cereal) products; choose products that have 3g or more fibre per serve
• Try wholemeal, high fibre or legume-based pasta instead of white pasta
• Swap white rice for brown rice, quinoa or buckwheat
• Choose a wholegrain breakfast cereal that has no/minimal added sugar. If ‘sugars’ content per 100g is more than 15g, check that sugar (or alternative names for added sugar) is not listed high on the ingredient list. Other names for added sugar include:
  • dextrose
  • fructose
  • glucose
  • golden syrup
  • honey
  • maple syrup
  • sucrose
  • malt
  • maltose, lactose, brown sugar, caster sugar, maple syrup, raw sugar, sucrose
• Swap white flour in baking with wholemeal flours, brown rice flour or oat flour.

Eating more grains

How to read a nutrition information panel

• Eat a wide variety of lean meat, poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts and seeds, legumes/beans
• Swap deep-fried or battered meat, chicken or fish for grilled, barbecued or oven baked
• Swap nutrient-poor processed sandwich meats such as fritz, salami and mettwurst for healthier lean options such as turkey, chicken, beef, tuna, salmon or sardines
• Improve your vegetarian cooking skills by incorporating a variety of protein sources such as eggs, nuts and seeds, legumes/beans, and tofu
• Swap sausages for homemade lean rissoles or meatloaf with added grated vegetables
• If you choose to eat red meat, choose lean unprocessed red meat.

Eating more lean meat and poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts and seeds and legumes/beans

Hi, my name's Themis Chryssidis. I'm an accredited practising dietitian and spokesperson for the Dietitians Association of Australia.

Today I'm going to share with you some of my top nutrition tips that you can use from the comfort of your own home.

I'm going to show you how to make a broccoli pasta with basil pesto. It's super simple, it'll be on the table in no time at all.

But, before we do anything, we need to wash our hands. Make sure you wash your hands thoroughly for around about 20 to 30 seconds, or for the duration of "Happy Birthday".

Thoroughly wash your hands, underneath your nails, between your fingers and all the way up to the tops of your wrists.

Then, once you've finished washing, use warm water to rinse your hands and use paper towel to dry them.

Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get a nice big pot of boiling water going.

Now, our pasta here, we've chosen to use penne. You could use whatever pasta you choose. Fettuccine, linguine, spaghetti, whatever you've got in your cupboard is completely fine.

We would also say, though, if you are going to choose a pasta choose something like a wholemeal pasta, okay? The darker, the less refined, the better.

Now that we've added our pasta into the boiling water, let's have a quick look at what equipment we're going to need for this recipe.

So, first up, we're going to need a little mini food processor for making our pesto. A sharp knife. A large, firm, thick chopping board. As well as a non-slip mat or a piece of damp paper towel or a Chux cloth underneath your board to stop your board from sliding around. A non-stick frying pan and a pot for boiling the water and the pasta.

Now, what we're going to do, we're going to get stuck into making our pesto first. So, obviously we've got all that beautiful fresh produce here.

Now, right now, I promise you fresh produce is in absolute abundance. There is no need to avoid it, there is no need to stockpile. Please, let's just shop sensibly, and make sure we purchase what we need, purchase what we're going to cook, let's not waste our produce and let's not waste our money either, okay?

So, what we're going to do. We're going to get half of our basil into our food processor.

Now all of these herbs and all of our produce here has already been washed using just cold running water as well. So let's get that in. As you can see I'm throwing my stems into here as well.

Now, some pine nuts. These guys have got some of those beautiful healthy fats, but they're going to add that lovely creaminess into the dish once we get blending. And then I'm also just going to add into here some of my parmesan too.

All right. We're going to get that in. And then we're going to give it a quick little blend. Okay, so, our basil, our pine nuts, as well as our parmesan, has all come together nicely here.

Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to take it out of my mini chop here. I'm just going to now combine it all with my olive oil, a little pinch of salt, and my lemon juice and my lemon zest as well.

I'm doing this in the bowl because it just stops it from going that little bit cloudy as well. And I like it because it just keeps the olive oil and the lemon a little bit more fresh too.

Okay, so here we go. A drizzle of olive oil. You do need a generous amount of olive oil for this, okay?

But if you buy a pesto from a shop, from a supermarket or somewhere else, I can promise you there's going to be even more oil in the pesto that you buy to keep it preserved, as well as to keep that nice texture that you're looking for in a pesto. But at least, if you make it yourself, you get to use good quality extra virgin olive oil as well. Which is really important too, from those health properties.

So, we've got our pesto here. We've got a little bit of extra virgin olive oil.

Now I'm also going to take my lemon and I'm going to zest some of my lemon zest into it, okay?

So over the bowl, get our zest in here. Don't throw the zest away, this is one of the best ingredients.

For me, it adds the flavour without changing the texture or the consistency of a dish too, okay, so make sure you get that in.

Now we're going to slice it open and we're going to put just a little bit of that lemon juice into the bowl as well.

And that there is our super simple pesto, all done, ready to go.

Now, you could go buy this at the shops if you wanted, without a doubt. But, the truth is, when money's a bit tight and we want to make sure we're filling our body with nutritious ingredients, why not make it home for yourself.

It's only a few ingredients. It's a little blender, and you're done. Give it a crack.

So, our pesto's all done. We're going to let that sit to the side.

I've got my pan on a nice high heat. My pasta is ready to be strained, so I'll just strain this over my sink.

So I've left a little bit of the water that the pasta was boiling in in the bottom of this pot here, because that will help just thin out our pesto a little bit when we bring the whole pasta together.

So I'll let that just sit there. It's not on, it's doing its thing.

My pan's on a nice high heat right now. So, what I'm going to do is just going to bring that back down slightly to a moderate heat.

Now, with our broccoli. What we're going to do, we're just going to cut the top of here. We're not throwing this bit away, okay, this is really important this part here.

I love the stem. There's so much flavour, so much texture in the stem of this broccoli. And the crazy thing is you're paying for it, so don't throw it away, okay?

So, what we're going to do, we're just going to cut this straight down in half. Put it onto the flat surface again. Cut that in half again, one more time. And then we're just going to slice through it.

And we're going to get this into the pan in just a second. Again, with this half, cut it in half, slice through it. Okay, done.

Now, with our broccoli, we can pretty much just snap the little broccoli florets in half, off the head here like so. And then any of the larger bits we can just basically slice in half as well.

If you don't want to use broccoli you could use zucchini, you could use squash, you can even use a bit of pumpkin.

A bit of roasted pumpkin, caramelise that down, cut it into small pieces, throw it into the pan and get a bit of colour on it. Yum, delicious. Pumpkin and pesto makes absolute sense to me.

So, a little drizzle of extra virgin olive oil into our pan now. Nice hot pan.

All right. Going to get this cooking away in just a second. So, throw it in. We want that sizzle, okay? We want to have nice kind of golden broccoli, all right? That's what we're aiming for.

I'm just pulling that apart, pulling these larger bits apart. Throwing them into the pan. As well as our little bits of stem that we've chopped up.

Now what we want to do is we want to let our broccoli just kind of sit there in the pan, all right?

Little extra drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. A little pinch of salt as well. We're going to let that sit there for a good kind of two or three minutes on a medium heat.

We're going to let it get some colour, get some caramelisation, and it will be absolutely some of the best broccoli you've ever tried.

So, while our broccoli is cooking away here, a little last drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Let it sizzle and do its thing.

We're going to get the rest of our ingredients ready, okay? So we're going to chop up our garlic as well as our chilli. And we're going to use some of these basil stems as well. But what we're trying to do is we want to make sure that our broccoli gets a bit of a head start. Because these guys, when we chop them up nice and small, they aren't going to take long to cook.

But these are absolutely the most important part of the dish almost, our chilli, as well as our garlic, our basil stems. Because they're going to inject flavour into this very quick cooking dish, okay?

So, if you don't like chilli super hot you can remove the seeds by simply slicing the chilli straight down the middle. And then using a little spoon if you want to remove the seeds nice and evenly. You also want to remove the membrane, okay, not just the seeds, because that's where a lot of the heat comes from.

So, thinly sliced chilli done. I'm going to go with two chillies because, firstly, I like a little bit of heat in my food. But, secondly, I think when you are cooking a dish super quick this is really quite important for getting that flavour boost that's required when it doesn't have a long time to necessarily marinate.

All right, let's have a look at our broccoli over here. It's looking good.

The part that I love about pan frying vegetables like this is that we get this lovely kind of golden caramelisation that's taking place, but we also end up with beautiful bright coloured vegetables which makes them so much more appealing to the whole family.

And, on top of that, these guys maintain their texture as well. They maintain their texture and their nutrition, which makes eating vegetables so much more enjoyable.

Our broccoli is getting quite close now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in my chilli, okay, like this. I'm going to add in my garlic as well.

I'm also going to cut up a few of our beautiful basil stems. Any soft herb you use do not throw the stems out. I'll just chop the little bottom part of there, that slightly woody part.

I'm going to throw my stems into this part of the pan now, let these guys cook down. And then we'll use our leaves as the garnish, okay?

And obviously we've used a lot of our basil as well in the pesto to begin with. Get that in. Yum.

Then we've got one of the key ingredients here in my opinion, is these little anchovies.

Now, I know anchovies aren't everyone's, I suppose, first choice food. But, for me, they're an absolute pantry staple. Now, if you don't have anchovies you could simply use something like capers, something else that's going to add that little bit of saltiness to this dish.

But anchovies are so nutritious though. Full of calcium and those healthy fats. It's absolutely what we want to make sure we're trying to eat during these kind of times where we're spending a little bit more time at home.

All right. So I'm going to bring that back now again to a medium heat. A good drizzle of olive oil to let all these aromats get to know each other. Our broccoli and our delicious aromats, comprised of our garlic and our chilli, have all cooked out in the pan. And they're looking charry and gnarly and absolutely delicious.

So much nutrition in that one pan. Looks great.

We've got our pesto that's all ready to go as well. And we've got our pasta that's boiled. Now all we need to do is bring it together.

So, I'm going to throw my pasta now into this bowl. Okay, into our pot, with all our lovely beautiful broccoli.

Now we're going to get our pesto into here as well. Okay, we want to make sure we get all of that into there.

And now we're just going to toss it all together and it's time to plate up. All right, so the pasta and the broccoli is all covered in our beautiful, rich, creamy, bright pesto. I'm now going to put it onto our plate.

I love broccoli in these kinds of dishes because the broccoli with the little florets kind of work as flavour catchers, and they keep all the pesto and all the sauce sucked into the broccoli. And it just adds so much flavour to this delicious vegetable.

I tell you what, this dish has not taken long to prepare. And it's on the table in just a few minutes.

We've got a little bit of extra parmesan. We're going to grate this over the top. Okay, like this. Lovely.

We've got a little bit of these extra basil leaves that we've kept from earlier on when we made our pesto.

And I'm going to just hit it with just a little bit more of our beautiful parmesan. And a little bit of extra lemon on the side if you want to add a little bit of extra acidity or zestiness to your broccoli pasta.

This is a super simple dish. We've made use of that beautiful, fresh, abundant broccoli that's in season right now.

If you don't want to use fresh produce but you've got some frozen stuff, use it. Nothing wrong with that. Frozen broccoli is perfectly fine, it's just as nutritious.

So, go ahead, just make sure you defrost that quite thoroughly before you use it. Because you don't want it to become waterlogged in the pan. The drier the better. So defrost it thoroughly.

Maybe use a bit of paper towel to take away any of that excess moisture as well.

We've got basil, we've got broccoli, we've got chilli, we've got anchovies. It's a super nutritious dish.

It's bright green. When you eat it it makes you feel healthy. You've got to give it a shot.

So, as you can see, it is possible to eat a nutritious diet and stay healthy all at the same time whilst in the comfort of your own home.

So let's jump into the kitchen and put some of this into practise.

• If choosing plant-based milks such as soy, almond, oat, coconut, or rice milk, ensure there is added calcium by checking the label. Aim for 100mg of calcium per 100ml.

• Instead of a yoghurt containing added sugar, try sweetening plain reduced fat natural or Greek yoghurt with fresh, frozen or canned fruit.
• Replace foods rich in saturated fats such as cream and sour cream with protein-rich dairy foods:
  • Swap cream on desserts for low-fat ricotta mixed with a little apple juice, or a dollop of reduced fat yoghurt
  • Swap cream in cooking for reduced fat (or light) evaporated milk
  • Replace sour cream with reduced fat natural or Greek yoghurt.

These alternatives provide more protein and calcium making them a healthier choice.

Eating more dairy

Some foods are higher in added salt, added sugar and/or alcohol. These foods are often called discretionary foods, sometimes foods, junk food or occasional foods. Regardless of the name, they can offer enjoyment and variety but fewer essential nutrients.

Eating these foods often or in large amounts may increase the risk of developing chronic diseases. These foods are readily available and often marketed to grab our attention.

However, they lack the essential nutrients (like protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals) our body needs to help us go about our day with ease and energy.

Eating too many discretionary foods or eating them too often, can lead to the development of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay and certain cancers.

Prioritise the 5 food groups and limit intake of the following foods:

• sweet biscuits, cakes, desserts, muffins and pastries

• muesli bars

• savoury biscuits and crackers

• processed meats such as ham, bacon, corned beef, salami, mettwurst, fritz, sausages, and frankfurts

• ice-cream and ice confections

• confectionary such as lollies and chocolate

• savoury pastries and pies

• take-away burgers, pizza, fried foods and chips

• crisps, potato chips and other fatty and/or salty snack foods

• cream, butter and spreads

• sugar-sweetened fruit drinks, soft drinks, cordials and energy drinks.