While barreling through a busy life, eating highly nutritious meals on a regular basis can feel like an incredible challenge. The key to maintaining a healthy diet while running your tail off is picking ingredients with extremely high vitamin and mineral contents. Leafy greens are quickly catching the attention of people wanting to improve their diet without committing a lot of time to food prep. Simply switching out iceberg or romaine lettuce in favor of the following greens can improve your diet considerably. You can also blend these greens into your shakes to net their benefits without taking time to eat a whole meal.

Kale

Kale is an incredibly versatile dark leafy green that packs a powerful nutrient punch. Just 3.5 ounces, or 100 grams, of kale provides more than half of your daily vitamin A requirements. Furthermore, it gives you a two-gram burst of protein and satisfies more than 700% of your daily Vitamin K needs. Kale offers just as much manganese, calcium and vitamin C as a handful of nuts for a fraction of the calories. You can place kale on your sandwiches, use it in salads or bake it in the oven to make chips. It also makes an amazing addition to your morning protein or fruit based shake.

Spinach

Spinach is the new lettuce. Many people are using raw spinach leaves in place of lettuce in wraps and salads. Raw spinach doesn’t have a strong taste on its own, so it makes an amazing lettuce substitute. You can also cook up spinach in rice, soup or noodle dishes to boost the nutrient content of that meal. A serving of spinach, at 100 grams or 3.5 ounces, gives you a huge bump in trace mineral amounts required each day. Furthermore, you’ll receive a healthy amount of vitamins K, C, A, E and B, including folate.

Arugula

The deeply peppery taste of arugula often encourages its use as a spice. It actually has enough flavor and substance to stand on its own as a salad, sandwich or soup ingredient. You can even fry up this green alongside scrambled eggs for a spicy kick. A full serving of arugula gives your body a boost of A, B, K and C vitamins. High folic acid content makes this an excellent addition to meals eaten by pregnant women. Since the pepper taste is so strong, it doesn’t make the best ingredient for sweet protein shakes, but it often complements berry flavors beautifully.

Balancing Out Your Meals

Make sure that you are eating a wide variety of ingredients to keep your diet balanced. Instead of looking at your diet on a daily basis, average it out across the week or month. You may have solid days where you eat all four food groups and you may also notice days that favor a particular kind of food over the others. As long as your diet balances out on average, you should be ingesting the right mix of vitamins and minerals for a healthy mind and body.