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Cooking for Your Health
Have you ever thought about which is the healthiest way to cook your food? Well I have and I wanted to share the best and the worst ways to cook dinner for your family tonight.
Baking
Baking isn’t just for treats and sweets. It can be a great way to prepare seafood, lasagna and even fruit. Bake food in covered cookware with a little of its own juices and you won’t need extra oil to keep it moist. Roasting, is a related technique that uses higher temperatures and is good for starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, squash and lean cuts of meat.
Boiling
Research shows that boiling vegetables leaches nutrients into the cooking water and down the drain. Yet this method actually improves the nutrient value of carrots over raw ones. Steaming this root vegetable will destroy it’s nutrients before it becomes tender enough to eat, while boiling it for just 3 to 4 minutes will allow cell walls to dissolve, making the nutrients inside more accessible.
Broiling
Like grilling, broiling food until well done creates HCAs. You can reduce HCA formation by broiling animal protein until it’s cooked to ‘medium’ doneness, but not charred.
Deep-frying
In this type of cooking, food is submerged in hot oil. It cooks fast but this process adds too much bad – particularly unhealthy trans fats.
Grilling
Grilling meat creates dangerous HCAs which have been linked to cancer. If you love your grill, then there are some ways to mitigate the damage. Make vegetables the focus. Flip meat every few minutes to avoid prolonged contact with high heat. And marinate the food first which lowers HCA formation significantly.
Microwaving
While microwave cooking will help some foods – like spinach – retain their nutrients, adding water may negate that effect. Worse, microwaving may alter the composition of molecules in food, especially proteins, in harmful ways. Try to use your microwave only for defrosting and rapidly reheating leftovers.
Pan-frying
This technique uses less oil that deep frying but can produce more HCAs than baking.
Sautéing
Lightly sautéing chicken, fish, and vegetables including sweet potatoes and mushrooms in a little olive oil helps retain their nutrients. Add some water, stock, or wine to keep the temperature from getting too high.
Steaming
Cooking food in this manner keeps nutrient levels high and calories low. This is a good choice for veggies and fish.
Stir-frying
A traditional Asian method, stir-frying involves cooking veggies at high temps quickly in small amounts of oil. This is considered healthy as long as you don’t let the oil get hot enough to smoke.
What is your preferred way of cooking? Will you change how you cook some things? Share with me below!
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Source: Dr. Weil’s ‘Guide to Eating Healthy”
Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links.
