healthy side dishes

To get maximum nutrition and flavor from your fruits and vegetables, combine brightly colored varieties for healthy side dishes.

Pizza on the grill? Great idea!

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Man (and woman) can't live on burgers, chicken, and hotdogs alone, even on the biggest cookout days of the year. So include some yummy fruit and vegetables with your grillside meals—for healthy side dishes that add terrific taste as well as extra nutrition.

And the more variety in your healthy side dishes, the better. Researchers have tried for years to pinpoint the most nutritious fruits and vegetables, but the fact is no single type covers every nutrient we need. For example, perennial crowd favorite watermelon contains high levels of the phytochemical lycopene, but the spuds in some tasty potato salad provide far more of the mineral potassium. So it’s good to take the combo approach.

Our selection of sides offers just the sort of produce mix you need. A good rule of thumb for fruits and vegetables: The more colorful your choices, the more nutrients you’ll consume. For example, the Grilled Mixed Vegetables include red bell peppers, which (along with the yellow version) contain more than twice the amount of vitamin C as the standard green variety.

What’s more, topping vegetable sides with olive oil-based dressings can make the vegetables even healthier for you. A study found that people who ate salads with dressings that contained fat (such as olive oil) absorbed more nutritients from the salad than when the dressing was fat-free. Even reduced-fat salad dressing did better than fat-free versions at boosting absorption of nutrients such as beta-carotene and lycopene. This confirms what scientists have known for some time, which is that fat is actually necessary for helping us process vitamins.