The Key to Healthy Eating Goes Beyond the Food

When it comes to eating healthy, it goes beyond just the foods you eat, but it also includes the way you prepare those foods and the seasonings you use in those foods. You can take a healthy food, but if you prepare it with seasonings that are loaded with empty calories, you have defeated the purpose of eating healthy foods. In order to assure that you are eating the healthiest foods possible, you want to pay close attention to the way you prepare foods your family eats and the type of seasonings you include. Many herbs and spices have almost no calories yet provide flavoring that is even tastier than that of the customary butter, salt and pepper.

One of the problems with choosing healthy foods is learning to prepare them in ways that are healthy as well. For example, when people buy zucchini, the first thing they want to do is bread it and fry it in butter which turns a healthy vegetable into one that is high in saturated fat and cholesterol.  If you want to fry foods, you should learn to use olive oil which has no cholesterol and is actually healthy for you. Learning to bake or grill meats instead of frying them makes a big difference in not only the calorie content but also the cholesterol and fat. Unfortunately there are still many people who insist on frying chicken, steak and pork chops because that is the way they were taught or because they have developed their own recipe and think any other method of cooking will spoil the flavor of their creation. It’s important to learn how to make adjustments so that your family is eating meals that are healthier, something that is not only a part of the foods you prepare but also the way you prepare them as well.

In addition to parents learning how to cook healthy foods, the schools need to learn to prepare healthy snacks. Some of the responsibility falls to the vending machine vendors that service the schools, but with Healthy Student Vending (a YoNaturals initiative) offering healthy and organic snacks, they can replace the empty calorie snacks that many schools now offer in their vending machines. Replacing unhealthy snacks in vending machines in our schools is certainly a step in the right direction, but it has to follow to every area of a child’s life, especially the home. Parents need to make a commitment to change the foods they buy and the way they cook them in order to provide their families with healthy meals.

Author: Brenda Coxe