Love Your Leaves - Kale

With its dark green leaves, kale is packed with fibre and nutrients and is one of the most beneficial of all the leaves. As well as providing vitamin C and B6, just one cup of kale provides you with more than two times your daily requirements of Vitamin A and over 680% of your daily recommended amount of vitamin K. It also has lots of minerals such as copper, potassium, iron and manganese. It can be great for maintaining healthy skin and hair, strong bones and reducing the risk of heart disease. Eaten regularly it can also lower the risk of cancer, help keep blood pressure lower and control glucose levels. As with all green leaves it’s best to mix and match to get the broadest range of nutrients, rather than over-relying on one type of leaf, so perhaps aim to eat raw kale once a week. It can be a bit tougher and chewer than other leaves, but don’t let that put you off. The Cookie and Kate, website, which has lots of great kale salad recipes, recommends when preparing the kale, that you remove the ribs first as these can be tough and make sure you chop it small and season it well. It also suggests you scrunch the leaves up with your hands briefly before serving to make the leaves softer.

So if you want to give kale a try this week, how about these tasty recipes:

Next week we look at our last leaf in the series – pea shoots.

Blog, NutritionClaire Edwards