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I borrowed The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Total Nutrition from my cousin, who told me that I could borrow it in exchange for a daily nutrition tip. From now until I finish the book, I’ll be posting short tips from the book on a daily basis. Hopefully you’ll find it useful too! Each day, I’ll try to include a challenge for you; either to skip something bad or try something healthy. Keep checking in with me if you’d like to follow along
Healthy food preparation is pretty easy, you just might have to adjust your recipes a bit. You can improve the nutritional value of your favorite meals or enticing recipes by incorporating some of these preparation tips. This week, make it a point to try out a few of these methods, and at least one you’ve never tried before:
- Instead of frying, use low-fat and no-fat cooking methods including microwaving, poaching, steaming, baking, broiling, grilling, and stir-frying.
- Instead of cooking oil, use nonstick vegetable sprays or liquids like broth, water, juice, or wine.
- In casseroles and meat sauces, replace up to one-half the meat with beans, cooked brown rice, bulgur, or couscous. This will reduce fat and add fiber.
- When cooking poultry, apply seasoning under the skin (use kitchen shears to detach skin in one area to allow you to season underneath), and cook with the skin on. Before serving, remove the skin. In this way, the meat will be seasoned and leaving the skin on will result in moister meat. Studies have shown that fat from the skin is not absorbed into the meat during cooking.
- To thicken soups and sauces, use soft tofu, plain nonfat yogurt, potatoes, carrots, or cauliflower instead of flour, cream, egg yolks, and butter.
- Replace butter and lard in recipes with olive, sesame, canola, safflower, sunflower, or corn oils.
- Reduce the quantity of chocolate chips, coconut, nuts, and bacon by half in recipes.
- When baking, use fruit purees to add flavor and texture instead of fats.
- Replace at least half your white flour with whole-wheat flour. You can also find whole-wheat pastry flour for baked goods that require a light texture.
- Substitute pureed green peas for half the avocado when making guacamole.
- Top your pizza with veggies instead of meat, and look for whole-wheat crust.
- Use non-fat plain yogurt in place of sour cream.
- Use 1/2 the fat that a recipe calls for. When a recipe calls for a large amount of sugar, scale it back by 25%.
