Healthy Swaps for your meals
Knowing how best to make meals in your home healthier is a tricky business. Yet, it’s an important one! Ensuring that your food is as healthy as possible is a great way to make sure that you’ll lead a healthier life, one step at a time.
The chefs on our app all have experience cooking for people with a number of different types of dietary requirements, from allergies to specific calorie restrictions. We’ve put together a few of the tips and swaps that they use to keep calories as low as possible.
Nuts or beans as a creamy base
A number of people’s favourite meals have a rich, creamy base to them. From Spaghetti Alfredo to steak with a side of rich, creamy mashed potatoes, people adore that gentle flavour. The best way to swap that gentle flavour and richness for something a little less calorific is to use foods that have some natural fat in them. The best examples of this are beans and nuts. Pulsing them into a paste provides you with a base to which you, or one of our cooks, could add milk, cream, or another liquid to create a lighter form of a fatty fish.
Natural sweeteners instead of synthetic ones
This might sound a little surprising at first, but natural sweeteners like honey or treacle are often a little better for you than synthetic ones like aspartame. This is because both options have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, local honey is more calorific than synthetic sweeteners, but it also has advantages for people struggling with hayfever. Synthetic sweeteners are low on calories, but they can also have negative impacts on digestive health.
As long as you eat and drink within a reasonable calorific range, honey and sugar can be more beneficial in your diet than synthetic options. A cook will know how much of a given ingredient you ought to be eating and will be happy to work with you to adjust everything from portion size to sugar percentage in a particular meal.
Healthy fats whenever possible
This is another option that may sound odd at first but does add up when you take a step back to look at it. At the most basic level, it’s quite simple – all fats have roughly the same number of calories per unit. This means that when you pick between vegetable oil and butter, for example, you’re picking between the individual good and bad qualities of those fats – the calorie counts per gram are very similar.
Therefore, as with sweeteners, some fats have more benefits than others. A great example of this is that butter from grass-fed cows has great vitamin content compared to other, similar fats. A great cook will know the contents of different types of fats, and this will help them tailor meals to your needs.
There are plenty of healthy ways to swap certain ingredients for others in your home – the options are endless! By making a few changes, or asking a knowledgeable cook, you can be on the track to a better diet in no time at all!
Author: Lewis Brindley
Instagram: @lewis_brindley