Cooking healthy: from impossible to possible

If you find yourself cooking these Holiday days, try the cooking ingredient swaps from LiveStrong.

With these tips you could re-invent any recipe into a healthy recipe. I have been applying the swaps (one example is here: pumpkin bread), and will continue having fun dusting off old sugar/calorie-loaded recipes into healthy treats.

When I evaluate new recipes, first I scan the ingredients. I evaluate whether these are unhealthy, and whether I could make healthy substitutions in order to incorporate the meals into our family diet.

The most surprising revelation is that most of the so-called “healthy” recipes still do not make it to my kitchen (even with the likely healthy swaps). These are the recipes that call for expensive and/or exotic ingredients that I would not consider buying.

I have a high respect for the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), and I have previously praised the organization.  AICR focuses on cancer prevention through diet and physical activity. 

However, the AICR attitude to healthy cooking is too elitist. Just look at the healthy recipes they promote. The link is for a veggie ball recipe with 17 ingredients, among which are: Medjool dates, sun-dried tomatoes, flax seeds, tahini, nut meal…  Prep and cook time is 1.5 hours. Really? Dear AICR, do you have to make healthy food and its prep so difficult, expensive and outrageously out-of-reach for the majority of the U.S. population?

Instead, compile a cookbook of 10 basic healthy recipes and start a campaign for schools to implement real cooking lessons. This might be the only way our children will evade the obesity sentence and escape the deadly clutches of our junk food industry.