In the season of cold and sore throats, if you crave healthy food or just want a warm meal, soup is exactly what you need.

Enjoying a bowl of hot soup is an easy, quick and delicious way to add more nutrients to your diet.

However, although it is a varied and delicious dish, not all soups are as healthy as you might think.

In this article, we will tell you about the benefits of soup, when to eat it, and how to make your soup healthy!

First and foremost, what you should know is, “What makes soup healthy?”

Your choice of ingredients for your soup will determine whether it’s healthy or not.

• For example, using chicken, vegetable, or meat broth provides you with vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, such as collagen. It also gives you great flavor with less fat and calories.

• And don’t forget to use vegetables. Eating more vegetables is associated with a lower risk of weight gain, which is a risk factor for chronic diseases, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer.

Vegetables also provide many benefits due to their high content of vitamins, minerals and fiber.

And you are not limited to a particular type of vegetable, as you can prepare soup from anything available in your kitchen.

• Use healthy fats, such as olive oil, in small quantities.
• Don’t forget to add protein to your soup, like chicken cubes or legumes, etc.

Simply, try to fill your bowl as much as possible with the nutritious ingredients you love to get the most nutrients.

But not all soups are healthy:

Just as choosing nutritious ingredients will result in a healthy meal, some of the ingredients used to improve the texture or taste of soup may turn it into an unhealthy dish that you should avoid.

Such as:

Ingredients used to improve thickness and texture:

Some of the most common ingredients used to thicken soups include milk, heavy cream, coconut cream, cornstarch, bread, cheese, egg yolks, and roux (a mixture of butter and flour).

In small amounts, these ingredients can be part of a healthy diet, but you should be careful of the quantities you put in your soup.

Most thickeners are foods that contain high amounts of calories per gram, so consuming large quantities of thick foods means that you consume more calories than your body needs, which may lead to weight gain.

Sodium:

The most important soup types to be careful of are instant and canned soups, which are often loaded with sodium.

Too much sodium is linked to high blood pressure, which is a risk factor for heart and kidney disease and stroke.

A healthy bowl of soup contains 360-600 milligrams of sodium per serving, but one cup of canned soup can contain 800 milligrams or more of sodium!

This is because many companies add a certain amount of salt to help prevent the growth of pathogens, to extend the expiry date of soup, and because it makes it taste so much better!

And what is widely known is that you should eat or serve the soup dish before the main meal, why?

In restaurants:

Soup can be cooked and kept warm until it’s required when people order food, pre-prepared soup is served to them immediately while the main course is prepared.

As for health:

When eating warm soup before the main meal, the stomach is alerted and various digestive juices are secreted in the stomach and guts, which helps in the proper digestion of the main meal and what is beyond.

You may read on the Internet that the soup itself can be relied upon when adopting a slimming diet,

So is the soup diet really effective in losing weight?

Studies have found that individuals who regularly consume soup tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and are less likely to be obese than those who do not eat soup at all.

The main reason why soup is associated with a decrease in body weight is not known, but some studies indicate that it helps increase the feeling of satiety because it contains fiber and protein, and therefore eating soup regularly may help reduce the number of calories you eat daily.

You often eat soup more slowly than other meals and it takes you longer, allowing your brain to receive satiety signals before you eat much more than you need.

In general, more accurate, long-term studies are needed to confirm the soup’s effect on weight loss.

But as long as you do not eat soup that includes cream, butter, or other fatty ingredients, and pay attention to the appropriate amounts of protein, soup can help you get rid of excess weight.

In addition to helping you lose weight, soup offers additional benefits, including:

Keeping you warm:

When the temperatures outside reach freezing levels, nothing will keep you warm like a bowl of soup. Unlike caffeinated hot beverages that dehydrate you, soup nourishes you from the inside and helps increase your internal body temperature.

Good for your digestive system:

Unless you go for a creamy soup, most recipes include fibrous vegetables, beans, lentils, and meat, all of which save your digestive system and keep the process smooth.

• Increases the amount of vegetables in your diet.
• Increases your water intake: In order to obtain broth, you must inevitably increase the amounts of water in the recipe.
• Easy to stick to as a healthy diet.
• Through soup, you can introduce nutritious ingredients to your children’s diet by choosing the ingredients they like.

You can check out Sara PopFit’s delicious and healthy soup recipes and try them now, such as immune boosting soup, okroshka soup, healthy linden soup, red beet soup, and more.

Written by: Mai Majar

Sources:

healthline

healthline