How to Incorporate Fruits into your Daily Diet

Every time a new week/month begins, we remind ourselves that we'll incorporate more and more fruits in our everyday diet. But it only takes 3-4 servings for us to realise how disinterested we really are in them. Add to this, the delicious fruits are not the staple ones. Most fruits like grapefruits, lychees, dark grapes and strawberries aren't as easy to get as the same-old, boring apple, oranges and bananas. So how does one get the recommended three to four daily servings of fruits in his daily diet? The trick lies in somehow tricking your taste buds (actually, your mind) into eating and enjoying more fruits every day. Here's how you can do that: Insert Fruits in your Breakfast Add at least one whole fruit to your breakfast. If you take eggs and toast in breakfast, then add a fruit like papaya or banana to a smoothie, with some yogurt. If you eat cereal, then add a fruit like apple to the bowl. So irrespective of the type of breakfast you take, you must include fruits in it.

a quick fruit smoothie on the side, or a quick addition of fruit chunks, will go a long way in improving your daily diet and will help in curbing your mid-noon hunger pangs. Mid-noon Snack Bring a whole fruit or a bowl of chopped fruit to work with you. You can munch on it while working so that it doesn't affect your work in the office. Now what if you don't really like munching fruits? Just sprinkle some chaat masala or oregano with some chilli flakes and see how much you like them. Early Evening Snack It's 4 in the afternoon and your body (it's actually the mind most of the times) is craving for some sugar and carbs. Beat the post noon blues, by gorging on some delicious fruit snacks. Go for fruit salads topped with a hint of honey and nuts, or add a thin layer of healthy cheese or paneer to a fruit like muskmelon to make it interesting.

Oranges taste great with some chilli and salt ground with coriander and cumin. Adding condiments to fruits will up the taste and you won't mind eating them. Way better than the calorie-rich burger in your office café. Late Evening Snack Once you get into them, you won't mind a fourth helping of fruits in a day. In fact, you'll love it.

Chances are that by now, you can be craving for some flavour-rich snack. Pause before you turn towards the same old samosas, pakoras or fries. Enjoy a citrus fruit like an orange or grapefruit. And wait, you can also add also add some chopped fruits to a bowl of chilled yogurt flavoured with your favourite spices.

Then there's also the good ol' fruit chaat. So these are some of the ways in which you can cajole yourself into consuming more fruits. And once you develop a thing for them, which we're sure you will, you won't like missing them even for a single day. This will do good to your health in two ways: it'll rid you from the junk food you inevitably consume every time you feel hungry and second, fruits are anyway beneficial for your health. From your side also, explore different ways to make fruit intake interesting, and within just a week or two, you will notice weight and inch loss. (MensXP.com) Also read:

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 Courtesy Agrihunt

Agriculture touted as saviour for Grafton

Grafton Chamber of Commerce president
Jeremy Challacombe at a rally to save
Grafton jail (Samantha Turnbull - ABC North Coast)

Chamber of Commerce head says Grafton needs to plan for the future and look at resurrecting farming as a major industry The president of Grafton's Chamber of Commerce is calling for a massive rethink about the city's future and what industries it needs to preserve or resurrect.

Jeremy Challacombe said the closure of a Telstra call centre and an abattoir in recent years had hurt Grafton enough, and it could not cope with a proposed restructure of the local jail.

"We can't take much more," he said.

"We have got to get together as a community and say 'where are we going?'

"It's not about politics anymore, it's about our community and I would expect people from across the board to sit down and say 'where are we going to go, how can we rebuild this?'

"Led by council, led by the chamber, irrespective of political persuasions let's find out what the problems and see how we can counteract it, not only in this town, it's a model for other country towns too."

Mr Challacombe believes agriculture could play a major role in saving Grafton.

"We were a really strong agricultural centre, we've got a stack of water, a magnificent river, we've got a magnificent coverage of forest here," he said.

"We don't want to get into a debate as to wisely or not wisely using our natural resources, but we have the natural resources there to manage wisely.

"We can value-add. We've seen agriculture cut down and cut down and cut down - let's actually go the other way.

"I grow strawberries for example, I would love another dozen strawberry growers here then we can put in a strawberry factory, then we can start to move forward.

"Let's get some incentives to process and value-add to what we produce in this valley."

Original Article Here  

Organic farming improves pollination success in strawberries

Organic farms produce strawberries with fewer malformations and a higher proportion of fully pollinated berries relative to conventional forms, according to new study.

The study,published in the journal PLoS ONE was led by Georg Andersson of Lund University in Sweden.

Andersson and colleagues investigated the effect of organic farming compared to conventional. What they found was that the pollination success increased greatly with organic farming. The researchers speculate that this effect may be due to an increase in insect pollinator abundance and/or diversity that comes with organic farming.

They also determined that this effect was apparent within two to four years of the conversion, suggesting that there is not a significant lag time before pollination benefits are seen after adopting organic farming practices.

The study is based on studies of strawberry plants on twelve farms in the county of Skåne, Sweden. On the farms with ‘KRAV’ organic certification, where neither pesticides nor non-organic fertiliser are used, 45% of the strawberry flowers were fully pollinated. On the conventional farms, the corresponding figure was 17%.

The results, say Dr Andersson, “suggest that organic farming could enhance the pollination service in agricultural landscapes, which is important for developing a sustainable agriculture. The method made it possible to measure the pollination independent of landscape composition, soil-type and other factors that can affect pollination success”.

Courtesy nyrnaturalnews