Vegetables: Source of adequate health benefits

Abstract

Vegetables are considered essential for well balanced diets since they supply vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and phytochemicals. Vegetables are essential for balanced diets since they contribute a crucial source of nutraceuticals in our daily life. Nutrition is both a quantity and a quality issue and vegetables in all their many forms ensure an requisite intake of most vitamins and nutrients, dietary fibers and photochemicals which can bring a much needed measure of balance back to diets contributing to solve many of these nutrition problems. The nutraceuticals are the substances found as a natural component of foods or other ingestible forms that have been determined to be beneficial to the human body in preventing or treating several diseases or in improving physiological performance. The boosting of healthy vegetable products has coincided with a surging consumer interested in the healthy functionality of food. Each vegetable comprise a unique combination of phytonutraceuticals which differentiate them from other vegetables. In the daily diet vegetables have been strongly associated with improvement of gastrointestinal health, good vision and reduced the risk of heart disease, stroke, chronic diseases such as diabetes and some forms of cancer. This paper makes a review and discusses the health benefits of commonly used vegetables.