Let’s heal the customer!

Modern diets do not heal by fasting, but by eating, Bars and restaurants could profit from this fact. In the new millennium health preserving diets focus on what one should eat to stay healthy; the question is what can be considered a healthy diet? There are several answers to this question, but it is an irrefutable fact that certain foods contain material which help us preserve our health. Food shows on the telly and the Internet make more people interested in what they are eating, trendy foods appear and disappear. Bar and restaurant owners have to react to this. Today it may be enough to offer low-calorie dishes, but tomorrow a restaurant may make huge profits from cooking for health-conscious customers. Therefore, it is worth communicating what the dishes on the menu contain. In richer countries vitamins, minerals and probiotic materials are indicated on menus, while antioxidant has become a magic word that spurs sales. The easiest way to provide these materials is to add them to drinks. Based on an idea from Cape Town, last year German bars started serving “beauty drinks”. They prepared their own beverages from micronutritions, fruit extracts and stimulating substances, biotin, aloe vera, vitamins, collagens and special spices; most materials are available in drugstores or pharmacies. Beauty and health are not season-dependent, therefore beauty drinks can be consumed any season, at any time of the day. These drinks do not contain alcohol, still they sell like hot cakes. Exotic base materials are always very attractive and the cocktails are usually given promising names like Beauty-Colada, Vita-Colada or Catapult. We can find the same concept in Hungary as well. The Vita Juice Bar chain is present in malls around Budapest and for an extra HUF 200 they add health-mixes (protein, antioxidant, fat burner, etc) to fruit smoothies. Restaurants can use the types of food that already contain important materials. The collective name for these is superfood. Believers in phytochemicals highlight the importance of fruits and vegetables (mainly cabbage, beans, carrots, tomato, apple, grenadine, kiwi and watermelon), but they also favour eggs, soy, wholemeal cereals and olive oil, because of their role in avoiding vascular diseases and cancer. Cranberry is considered one of the most effective superfoods, it is practically the Jolly Joker in healing with food products. Researchers are of the opinion that what we know about the relationship between food and heath is only the tip of the iceberg. However, in the case of food it is not enough to be healthy: if it does not taste good, nobody will bother. Superfoods are really nice as well and most of them can be prepared in several ways. According to experts, beans, broccoli, cranberry, oat, soy, spinach, sweet potato, tomato, nuts, dark chocolate, wild salmon and extra virgin olive oil top the list of superfoods.