Healthy eating includes cultural foods — but that message isn’t prominent and often goes unapplied.

✅While kale is a nutritious vegetable, so too are dasheen bush (taro leaves) and spinach.

✅Quinoa is an excellent source of protein and dietary fiber, but rice and beans are too.

✅Chicken breast is low in fat and lauded as a must-have for a healthy diet, but if you remove the skin from other parts of the chicken, those pieces are low in fat too — and higher in iron.

✅Atlantic salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, but so too are local salmon varieties and other fatty fish such as sardines.

If kale, quinoa, and Atlantic salmon aren’t available in your region, your diet isn’t automatically poor. Contrary to mainstream health and wellness messages, a healthy plate isn’t limited to Eurocentric foods, and traditional foods aren’t inferior or nutritionally unfit.