Getting Real With Shadra Bruce
One of the easiest health changes you can make is to incorporate healthy cooking into your life. Healthy cooking does not have to be difficult or expensive. In fact, there are some relatively simple changes you can make to your everyday cooking habits that will make them healthier.
Pick the Right Oils
Extra virgin olive oil should be a staple, but it’s best used for drizzling on salads and veggies. It’s not actually the best for cooking, as it has a low smoke point (all oils have a smoke point, and once they’ve exceeded it, they lose their value and aren’t good to consume). Extra virgin olive oil is great for a lot of things, but not for sauteeing. The smoke point of EVOO is 320F. If you need a healthy oil with a higher smoke point, consider soybean or extra light olive oil.
Use Herbs and Seasonings, Skip Salt
I’ll never completed remove salt from my kitchen, and you shouldn’t either. It’s not a culprit as a seasoning – it’s the canned and processed food with 900mg of sodium per serving that’s doing you in, not the pinch of salt you add to your home-cooked creations. However, I do think we all rely on salt too much when there’s a world of flavor and health benefits waiting for us in the form of garlic and turmeric and pepper and rosemary and oregano.
Ditch the Deep Fryer and the Microwave
If you really want to incorporate healthy cooking into your life, don’t deep fry anything, ever. If it has to be deep-fried, it shouldn’t be part of your diet. I also recommend getting rid of the microwave. Yes, it’s convenient. Yes, it reheats with such ease and very little mess. But it alters food at the cellular level. That just isn’t good.
Eat What Grows
Replace boxed mac and cheese and cans of chili with leafy greens and roots like sweet potatoes and carrots. Eat what you can grow, and when you do have to buy processed food, choose those items that have the fewest ingredients. If it has ingredients you can’t pronounce, don’t eat it.
What do you suggest? Comment below or tweet me @MomsGetReal