If we were to define healthy cooking, we could say it is the science of preparing food that allows people who eat it maintain their well-being and their life energy, while not harming their internal organs. Why am I saying this? Because one can use stimulants such as caffeine for getting an energy boost, but this doesn’t mean what they do is healthy. Caffeine excess can lead to harmful long term effects. Too much saturated fats and trans fats intake, although harmless on short term, in time will lead to the raise of LDL cholesterol in the blood, therefore increasing the risk of cardio-vascular diseases. Too much alcohol will harm your liver, although on short term you’ll only feel dizziness, some nausea and a bunch of terrible hangovers that will be forgotten as soon as you’ll take some painkillers.
What Do Healthy Eating and Cooking Mean?
Despite popular belief, sticking to a healthy diet doesn’t call for important amounts of money and time. There are healthy recipes for breakfast, lunch or dinner that can be prepared quite fast and with only common, affordable ingredients. As you may already guess, healthy eating means more than occasionally eating fruit and veggies. Having only healthy snacks between your main meals also matters. Healthy eating is about understanding the action of various nutrients upon our body, then about learning how to combine foods in order to obtain well balanced meals. Moreover, healthy eating is about learning how to cook and store the foods without destroying their nutrients.
For instance, vitamin C is water-soluble, therefore it will leak into the cooking water. This is why it’s better to use steaming instead of boiling as cooking method if you want to preserve the vitamin C in foods. To give you one more example, reusing deep frying oil is one of the most dangerous things to do, even if the oil still looks clear. Heating unsaturated vegetable oil leads to trans fats creation even from the first time you heat the oil. Trans fats are hazardous for health, therefore it’s better to avoid them. This is why it doesn’t matter if you re-use it once, twice or more, or if you use it for meat or for veggies, it’s still unhealthy and it should be discarded after the first use. If discarding the oil after a single use is too expensive for you, then quit deep frying at all. It’s not that healthy, anyway.
Advantages of Healthy Eating
Adopting healthy eating as a lifestyle brings many benefits. A naturally healthy body, an increased passion for living and enjoying life, an optimistic perspective and a happier mood are only a few of the rewards for paying attention to what you eat each and every day, at each meal. Beware though, this is not a promise that if you cease all your bad habits and start eating only healthy foods this very moment, you’re going to never get touched by illness. It’s just you decrease the risk of developing some chronic conditions. However, the main reward of a healthy lifestyle is not the lesser probability of developing a cancer or a heart condition, but the quality of life and the tonus your body will get. It’s surely not so nice to be a young spirit willing to move and act freely, willing to swim and play tennis, eager to run and jump, yet forced to reside inside an ill body that can’t allow such movement, a body subject to the painful and embarrassing morning stiffness that keeps it from serving you the way you want.
If you have a car, you probably know that if you feed it with low quality fuel, the engine will break after a while and you’ll have to either fix it, buy a new one or change the car completely. Maybe doctors can help us fix our body most of the time, yet there are situations when medicine is powerless. As a complete replacement of the human body is yet to be discovered, conscious people will strive to take care of their current body, because it’s the only one they’ll ever have. Why would you be more careful with your car than with your body?
What Is This Healthy Cooking Website About?
Stick with us and we are going to show you how vitamins and mineral in foods change during the cooking process, what are the critical temperatures for safe cooking, which are the essential nutrients contained in various foods and many other such info that we think it’s helpful for learning the art of healthy cooking. We are not specialists in nutrition, we are just ordinary people who decided to adopt a healthy living style and who find pleasure in sharing their research with others. Where possible, we are going to include references in our articles, so those of you who may be interested in knowing more will be able to go and read directly from the specialists about the specific topic of interest.
Additionally to the general health and nutrition information, Healthy Cooking includes a section containing simple recipes, structured on categories that follow the main meals of the day. We hope you’ll find them useful and we invite you to give us your feedback, because this is the best way we can improve and give you even better and more complete information about healthy cooking and about a rewarding and joyful lifestyle.
