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When stuck indoors, plants become your best way out
Key takeaways:
- Being more indoors and less physically active requires smarter food choices
- To cope with higher stress levels, add greenery to your home
- Maintain a healthy balance between longer lasting processed foods and fresh vitamin rich produce
- Keep track of the triple A rule: antioxidant-rich, alkalizing and anti-inflammatory for a stronger immune system
- Growing your own vitamin-rich food at home is the best way to reduce food waste and to ensure your herbs, fruits and veggies give you all the nutrients you need
Now that our way of life is mandatorily turning more indoorsy, it is even more important to pay attention to our physical and mental well-being. Protecting your immune system through informed food choices and creating a good living environment in your homes becomes critically important. A great solution in times like these is to pick up your indoor gardening game.
When we start eating, studying, working and spending leisure time only between the four walls of our home, we inevitably become less physically active and lose some of that much needed connection with fresh air and nature. Health experts are concerned that this will become a significant challenge to our mental health in addition to the more obvious complications arising from little physical activity.
Indoor plants help your mental well-being
Worldwide, our stress levels are on the rise with our 24/7 connected lifestyles. 35% of us complain about high levels of stress. It’s expected that more than half of us will be challenged by mental health problems at one point in our lives. When the usual remedies like meeting your friends and loved ones, doing group sports and exercises, taking a walk in the park and being in nature are becoming prohibited to an extent, we find our options of cutting back the stress limited.
Bringing more of that freshness of nature to your home can be extremely helpful here. Indoor plants are proven to be particularly effective in reducing stress, improving air quality, overall happiness and of course, your health through consumption.
Choosing what we eat when we are less active and under higher stress in our indoorsy life becomes highly important. Being less active warrants consuming fewer calories and focusing more on getting the right nutrients to keep ourselves healthy. And keep in mind here that in addition to maintaining your pants size it is even more important to consider your immune system.
Choose nutrient, not energy dense food
When we keep our visits to grocery stores less frequent and fill up our pantries and fridges, we tend to stock them up with foods that are more processed. Food that’s gone through higher levels of processing tends to be more carbohydrate-rich and has more calories but often lacks the valuable nutrients that our bodies need for a strong immune system, healthy body and mind.
The World Health Organization advises eating 400g/oz of fruits and vegetables daily (not including foods rich with starch, like potatoes) - that means ¼ of your plate. Today, however, as much as 78% of us globally don’t meet the recommended daily intake of vitamin rich food. In addition to hunger still being an acute problem for 800 million people, there are 2 billion of us who get enough calories and another 2 billion who consume too many of them, but don’t get enough vital nutrients.
Salads, herbs, fruits and vegetables are rich sources of healthy fiber, vitamins, minerals and loads of other non-nutrient substances like plant sterols, flavonoids and other antioxidants. Keeping a tight regime with maintaining a variety in your food consumption is your safest bet to ensure an adequate intake of many of these essential nutrients.
It is also advised to remember triple A nutrition in times like these. Food that is antioxidant-rich, alkalizing and anti-inflammatory helps you to balance the long lasting processed foods that are less rich with antioxidants, more acidic and have more inflammatory properties. Think kale, spinach, basil and other herbs and leafy greens.
Food management at home is as important as nutrient management
When going to the store turns less into a daily and more often a monthly activity then maintaining a healthy variety and amount of fresh vitamin rich salads, herbs, fruits and veggies in your home becomes breathtakingly difficult. Fruits and vegetables typically lose 50% of their healthy nutrients within one week.
On the other hand, even the fresh farmed food in our stores has become less nutritious within the past decades. Unsustainably intense farming practices, overuse of fertilisers, rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere and prioritising higher yield instead of higher content when choosing cultivated plant varieties has left its mark.
A smart solution for ensuring your daily need of healthy nutrients is to start growing your own vitamin rich food at home. Making fresh, vitamin rich food accessible, affordable and easy to grow is our mission at Click & Grow. That’s why growing with Click & Grow gives you 3 times more antioxidants and a higher concentration of vitamins and minerals than you could receive from store bought food.
We also want everybody to think about one of the biggest challenges in sustainability when going shopping with the intent of stockpiling - food waste. In our daily lives when we buy, cook and throw away some of the food, we might not even realize how big of a problem it is. Even more when our visits to grocery stores become less frequent.
If food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest CO2 emitter, following only the USA and China. Each year the food we produce but end up not eating produces 4,4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide - roughly 8% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As 90% of the environmental impacts of fruit and vegetable products come from the initial production stages, it is very important to consume everything that’s been produced and that you’ve bought or grown.
All of this might be overwhelming in times like this - teaching kids at home, working, studying, cooking and managing food, but luckily we’ve considered these problems of modern people and made growing with Click & Grow truly effortless.
Invest in your immune system, good mental and physical health and a happy indoor environment by growing vitamin rich fresh food in your home with Click & Grow.
Enjoy a sustainable, stress-free way to grow organic greens
Presenting the Smart Garden 27 and Smart Garden 9
Fully automated indoor gardens that grow plant pods for you while making sure they have enough water, light, oxygen and nutrients.