Eat Your Fall Color

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Everywhere we look there are beautiful colors, bright orange, red, and yellow leaves throughout our campus as well as at the Farmer’s Markets, grocery stores, and on our plates at many of the eateries on campus. There are several health benefits from sticking with a bright and colorful plate throughout the year, and fall is a great time to examine what your plate looks like and the benefits of eating a variety of the bright colored fruits and vegetables which are coming into season.

There are over a dozen types of winter squash with the most common being butternut, pumpkin, acorn, kabocha, spaghetti, and delicata. Winter squash is a fruit because it contains seeds. The seeds can be roasted and eaten as snacks or tossed into a salad or granola or trail mix. Seeds from squash are a good source of magnesium and zinc. Stress can deplete our magnesium levels so as we approach the end of the semester and stress builds, consider pumpkin seeds as a study snack. The flesh of the squash can be roasted, blended to make soups or smoothies or hot drinks (have you ever had a pumpkin latte made with real pumpkin puree?), stuffed, or baked into all sorts of delicious treats. Squash contains vitamins A, C, and E, which are all antioxidants that help promote healthy skin. Squash also contains a healthy amount of potassium and fiber, both of which aid in lower risk for heart disease and diabetes and stabilize blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

Another favorite fall food is apples. The phrase, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” has a lot of truth to it. Apples contain only 60 calories and when eaten raw with the skin on, we get about 20% of our daily fiber. Fiber helps slow our digestion process and keeps us full longer. Apples, like winter squash, also can help lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels as well as ease inflammation. Apples contain the antioxidant quercetin which acts the same as vitamins A, C, and E do in pumpkin and squash in lowering C reactive proteins. Eating raw apples on a regular basis also can change our overall microbiome due to the pectin found in apples acting as a prebiotic.

Apples are inexpensive and easy to find year-round. Popular apple varieties include Red Delicious, McIntosh, Granny Smith, Golden, Fuji, Gala, and my favorite, Honeycrisp, but more than 100 varieties are grown commercially in our country. There are U pick apple orchards in North Carolina and Virginia making it a fun day trip. Pick a bushel or a peck and enjoy!