We all want to eat healthy, and we're always looking for ways to improve our diets. But often, we're too lazy to spend any extra time in the kitchen cooking for ourselves, especially when there are so many quicker, easier alternatives to cooking. Take out restaurants and processed foods can interfere with our choices, but honestly, it's just as easy to grab an apple or a banana for your lunch as it is a chocolate bar or a packet of cookies.

Why go such great lengths to replace natural foods with cellophane wrapped alternatives when Nature has already provided us with the nutrition and the packaging? It's not very difficult to peel and eat a banana, and you're getting a lot more nutrition from that than you would from a sugar-wrapped snack.

Fruits like bananas, apples, and oranges that grow on trees (actually the banana tree is really a plant), should be your first choice when it comes to packing a snack in yours or your children's lunches, despite what food marketers want you to believe about juice boxes, fruit cups, and yogurt bars. Those things are what happen to fruit after they are processed.

So when you're at the supermarket next time, don't be impressed by fancy labels on the packages of processed fruit snacks, and make the right choice by buying real fruit for your snacks.

A Few More Banana Facts

-Bananas are grown in the Tropics, but are native of Southeast Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and Australia.
-The banana tree leaf is used widely in cooking and as a replacement for the plate
-Bananas also come in red and purple! The red banana tree is a popular house plant
-Bananas grow in bunches, but they're each bunch is a tier of "hands"