Winter Vegetables Will Help Make You Younger

Yes, color matters nad yellow-orange veggies like carrots, sweet potatoes, and winter squash are chock-full of carotenoids. Why should you care about carotenoids? These good-for-you nutrients fight the DNA damage that can make your body old (or sick) before its time. Over the course of your lifetime, your DNA accumulates damage every time it gets copied to create a new cell. It's like when you make a copy of a copy of a copy on the Xerox machine. Little flaws and imperfections start to show up. Same thing can happen with your DNA. And that's not such a great thing, because it can lead to that ultimate cell-replication error: cancer. Now the fact is that no foods are guaranteed to protect you from cancer, but fruits and vegetables contain fiber, vitamins, and phytochemicals that have a function in preventing cancer. One reason is that fiber is the plant material in our diet that is not digested. It keeps food moving through our intestines. Fiber, which comes from whole-grain breads and cereals, as well as fruit and vegetables.

Vitamin A and folate help cells develop normally. Vitamin A is present in liver, fortified dairy products, eggs, and butter. Asparagus, leafy green vegetables, and fortified cereals are good sources of folate. And there's more since vitamins C and E act as antioxidants. Antioxidants help prevent or repair damage to cells caused by pollution, sunlight, and normal body processes. Excellent sources of vitamin C are citrus fruits, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, peppers, and tomatoes. Vitamin E is also found in vegetable oils, seeds and nuts, leafy green vegetables, and tomatoes.

Phytochemicals are natural chemicals that give plants their color, flavor, smell, and texture. Phytochemicals are found only in plants, so it is important to eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, and beans. Researchers suspect that carotenoids — those plant pigments that give carrots, pumpkins, and cantaloupes their rich orange hues — may help protect against the kind of DNA damage that happens with age, so you can go on making copies of your cells longer. Eating a diverse diet that includes 5 servings of vegetables per day can make your RealAge as much as 4 years younger