What Makes a Recipe Healthy?
What Makes a Recipe Healthy?
There are three main factors that make a recipe healthy: the ingredients, how it is cooked or processed and how it is stored (or how soon it is consumed).
Healthy Ingredients
So what makes ingredients healthy (promoting health)? The best ingredients would be where you were the person to grow or raise the items because that way you are in control of what goes into the soil, on the plants or in the animal—so home grown, home raised items are the very best ingredients.
Second to home grown/raised would be in-season locally grown/raised from your local farmer’s market. After that would be organically grown/raised, as fresh as possible. The less herbicides, pesticides and animal antibiotics the better.
Healthy Cooking
Some things are best eaten raw, especially fruit, for example. Other things are still health promoting if they are lightly steamed (like some vegetables). Stir frying is generally a healthy way to cook. Some cookware is to be avoided, like teflon and teflon-like coated pans. Some unhealthy ways of cooking are to charbroil and to deep fry.
Healthy Processing
This is almost an oxymoron. Fresh and unprocessed is best for produce. Most dried foods are pretty healthy if done correctly. Frozen can be almost as good as fresh in some cases as far as nutrient preservation is concerned. Canned food is much less health promoting. The least amount of additives and preservatives the better as far as processing is concerned. One particularly unhealthy kind of food processing is hydrogenation (the process where hydrogen is added to oils to make them solid). These hydrogenated oils are very unhealthy (for example peanut butter that you don’t have to stir up).
Storing Food
The healthiest way to eat the food would be to consume it as soon as possible after cooking or preparing it. Some foods need to be kept refrigerated, especially those foods with raw dairy products and mayonnaise. Leftovers should not be eaten after three days as mold will most likely have started to grow (even if you can’t see it yet).