Get the soup attitude…

Soup has become a fashionable and sophisticated food of choice again. Soup is delicious, but there are many other good things about it too…

Its invigorating qualities certainly make soup perfect for cold, winter months. But soup is also making a big comeback because of its health virtues, as it can help us achieve a better nutritional balance and maintain a healthy weight. All good reasons to include soup in your daily meals… so everyone, pick up your spoons!

Soup attitude: comforting and hydrating

A hearty, steaming hot soup really perks you up when it’s cold outside: it’s good for you, warms you up and tastes delicious. But even in a heat wave, chilled or even iced soups are consumed happily, and are refreshing and thirst-quenching.

This is because soup has a high quantity of water, which is as important in summer as it is in winter, as we don’t always drink enough, and soup helps to satisfy our hydration needs.

Our advice: Don’t put too much salt in your soup. This ensures that you avoid getting to much sodium, and you will increase the potassium/sodium action, which helps water travel through the body and also aids elimination of toxins and waste

Soup attitude: up your veggie quota

One thing is sure: in serving up vegetable soup often, you’ll be getting a regular supply of precious nutrients to keep your body well nourished. Vegetables supply a large quantity of minerals and vitamins, fibre and different protective phytonutrients (indoles, phenolic or sulphurous substances…), which improve the body’s ability to fight all kinds of external threats. To you get the right quantity of veggies in a portion of soup, allow 150g of vegetables per person.

Our advice: In order to best preserve the nutrients in a soup, choose vegetables as fresh as possible, and don’t soak them or over cook them. To simplify things, you can just stick to basic one or two veggie soups and use a pressure cooker to get your soup in double quick time.

Soup attitude: low calorie, filling food

Soup is really good for your figure, as proven by the large-scale SU.VI.MAX study, which showed that people who regularly consumed soup had a lower BMI than those who didn’t eat soup. This does not mean that soup is slimming as such…

But when eaten at the beginning of the meal, soup limits how much you eat afterwards because, after a delicious soup, you are already satisfied. As soup has a low energy content (generally between 30 and 50Kcal per 100g, less than 100Kcal per portion), it’s an appropriate dish for those watching their figure and who are attempting to limit calorie intake in general.

Our advice: Soups with small chunks are more effective in filling you up than puréed soups, as they stay in the stomach longer. To ensure your soup has ‘subtle’ calories, here are our little tips for a soup that is slimming.

Tips for a slimming soup

In vegetable soup, replace potato with courgette;
Thicken cream based soups with a little cornflower or starch;
Don’t add cream or grated cheese – just a little milk or melted low-fat cheese;
Keep the flavour when reheating soup by adding (parsimoniously!) celery salt, coriander, nutmeg or curry powder…
To increase the nutritional content of your soup, don’t think twice about sprinkling some nutritional yeast or wheat germ into it.

Enjoy our great selection of soup recipes: Hearty soups or Vegetable soups

Anne Laurent

Posted 29.08.2011

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