Making Sense of Healthy Cooking Ingredients

When you talk about healthy eating and a healthy diet, images of fresh salads and low calorie foods may fill your mind. But a healthy diet is not made up of that alone. A healthy meal includes foods that are controlled in terms of calories, fats, and other detrimental food additives. If you are planning to stock your kitchen with healthy cooking ingredients to promote a healthier lifestyle, here is a quick guide how and why:

Low-fat or No-fat

Keep on hand a lot of ingredients that are low in fat or contain no fat at all. This applies to seasonings, flavorings, and additives. If you want to use oil for cooking, choose olive or canola oil since they are mono-saturated, meaning they are healthier than vegetable oils. Avoid buying/using processed food as cooking ingredients, since there are hidden fats in these kinds of foods. Instead, opt for more natural fats like those in fish, seeds, soy, olives, and avocado.

Also, when you buy AND store meat, take out the fat. (Like, in all beef cuts, for example.) Additionally, try using non-stick cookware, as it is one way of cooking healthier because you won't need cooking oil, a source of cholesterol. Further, you can switch to steaming, boiling, microwaving, baking, and braising food to maintain more of the valuable nutrients foods.

Healthy Cooking Made Easy!

Shop Healthy

Before you actually get to try your kitchen goddess skills with those healthy cooking ingredients, you must shop for them first. As such, the lifestyle change starts with shopping healthy. Stock your pantry and refrigerator with skinless meat, lean cuts, leafy greens, organic vegetables, and low-fat versions of dressings and gravy. Also be sure to add fish to your shopping cart, as it contains high amounts of protein and Omega 3, which is healthy for your heart.

Shop Fresh

Also, remember that when you shop for cooking raw materials, they have to be and look fresh. There's a cooking adage that says, "If it looks good, it probably is." When you're at the market choosing cooking ingredients, the greens have to be a healthy green color, the meat should be lean and faultless, and the spices should be well within their healthy date/s of consumption.

Healthy living starts in the kitchen because that's where what you put inside will be processed. Try searching the Internet for healthy cooking recipes to spend your great cooking raw materials on.

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Healthy Cooking For Beginners

The first thing to pop into your mind is probably, "what does he mean by healthy cooking?" What I have in mind is that healthy cooking involves the preparing of foods that not only recharge and rejuvenate the family, but will also leave them better off than they were before. This can only be accomplished thru the use of organic ingredients.

When I talk about organics, some people think that I'm just talking just about produce. That's not true; there are now organic versions of many animal products available also.

I advocate switching to organic ingredients for your cooking because most produce is sprayed with pesticides and grown with chemical fertilizers, Animal foods can contain growth hormones and antibiotics.

The hormones can cause premature maturing of children. Also, it's a fact that bacteria are increasingly becoming resistant to antibiotics. Scientists say that one of the reasons that bacteriia have become so resistant to antibiotics is because of all the antibiotics in our food.

Before buying organic ingredients, it's normal for people to ask one or more of the following questions;

1) How can I replace my whole menu with organic ingredients overnight?

Won't I pay a premium for organic ingredients?

How can I determine that an ingredient that I'm looking at is a genuine organic?

The short answer to question #1 is, "you don't have to". I recently read a book by Kevin Trudeau called," Natural Cures (they don't want you to know about)". In it, Kevin recommends changing one ingredient of your meals at a time to organic until eventually all of your cooking is with organic ingredients.

I experimeted with this technique and discovered that the my family made the transition to organics a lot more easily then I expected. So far, everything that I eat for breakfast is organic and my other meals are made up of more than half organic ingrediants.

The answer to question #2 is that unfortunately, organic ingredients usually will cost more. The number of people that buy organic products has increased, but the numbers haven't increased enough to cause economies of scale in the production and sale of of organic ingredients.

Organic ingredients generally go for more than non-organics, but if you are willing to do some leg work, you'll pay less than you may expect.

A good way to save money is to do as much shopping as possible at a farmer's market. Almost every town has a seasonal farmer's market. Some big cities even have a year round farmer's market. Prices are lower because you are buying directly from the farmer. Usually, you can only buy fruits, vegetables, spices and eggs at these markets, but you should be able to beat the non- organic prices in the supermarkets.

Another way to get your costs down is to shop at discount chains because many of them now have organic departments. Even the big guys like Wal-Mart have jumped on the organic bandwagon.

Another sure way to cut costs of your healthy cooking is to scratch cook more often. A good example is soup. Canned soup in the store usually has a lot of salt and other non- organic ingredients. Don't buy the package of chicken thighs. Purchase the whole chicken ( organic, of course ) and then proceed to do the honors yourself.

Don't buy the salad in the bag. Whenever possible, don't cook your vegebles, instead steam them if you have a recipe that says that they should be cooked. Steaming them will leave in more of the vitamins and minerals than high heat cooking.

Remember, every time someone touches your food, it will cost more.

To find the answer to question #3, all we have to do is look at the label on the package in front of us. To know if an ingredient you're looking at is organic look for the label that says, " USDA organic ". This means that the food has been certified by the USDA as being organic in origin.

This article has been meant to show you the logical starting point in your quest to provide healthy cooking for yourself and your family. In follow up articles I shall talk about such things as more reasons why you should buy organic ingredients and how to get refined sugar out of your cooking.

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