Chilled Beet Soup with Orange makes a great summer meal.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—When the temperatures soar, a steaming bowl of hot soup is probably the last thing you crave at mealtime. But cold soups? Now we’re talking. Sweet and savory soups are the perfect way to make use of summer’s bounty of fruits and vegetables. Plus, the liquid in fruits and vegetables that is the base for summer soups helps you stay hydrated, which is more of an issue during hot weather. The most water-rich summer fruits are melons, such as cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon, but many other fruits and vegetables are also significantly watery in composition—and all make for great cold soup recipes.

Here’s even more incentive for serving some cold soup recipes during swimsuit season: Recent Penn State University research found that a bowl of soup between meals is better than other snacks at staving off hunger. In the study, when women ate three different snacks that contained the same ingredients and calories, the soup version curbed their appetite the best. Soup does double-duty in keeping you satiated: You can eat a large portion that’s relatively low calories, and your stomach stays full for a long period of time. If you’re choosing between smooth or chunky soup, you might go with chunky, as another study found that people who ate soup with large vegetable pieces reported feeling fuller and consumed 20 percent fewer calories during lunch than people who ate a puréed soup with the same ingredients.

Puréed or chunky, our summertime cold soup recipes supply large doses of phytochemicals, which are plant substances that work together with vitamins and nutrients and may provide disease protection for humans. Research shows they may help prevent conditions from diabetes and cancer to cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure. There are phytochemicals in all kinds of fruits and vegetables, but a sure way to spot them is to look for bright colors, as phytochemicals are often found in a plant’s coloring agent. Some examples of healthful phytochemicals: lycopene in tomatoes and peppers; carotenoids in carrots; and polyphenolic compounds in red and green grapes. As a side benefit, those bright colors make your cold soup recipes look spectacular on the table at serving time.

But colorful produce isn’t the only place to find phytochemicals. Others, such as allyl sulfides, can be found in paler vegetables like garlic, onions, and leeks, which work well as flavor boosters in—you guessed it—chilled summer soups.