Low Fat High Flavor Diet Tips

So, you've decided you want to lower the fat in your meals, for better health, but you don't want to eat cardboard? If you like to cook flavorful foods, this article will give you some healthy tips on lowering fat and keeping the flavor. If you don't know where your stove is, I'll be writing articles on low-fat prepared foods and eating out in a couple weeks. You don't have to give up tasty food to be healthy. Most families only need to make minor adjustments to make great tasting foods far more healthy.

Adjust Meal Recipes: If you have favorite recipes passed down from past generations, chances are, the methods grandma used will please your palate just before they cause a stroke. I prepared my grandmother's apple dumpling recipe for Christmas last year. Being diabetic, I shouldn't have been in the same house while it was cooking. It was loaded with butter and sugar. By using light margarine, sweet apples and 1/3 the sugar, the recipe keeps the flavor but becomes something far less harmful. This is the kind of thing we can do with most recipes. Replace butter with a butter-tasting healthy spread. In some pastries (like cake) oil can be replaced with an equal amount of applesauce to retain the moisture and enhance the flavor. You could go through all your recipes and just replace all cooking oils with canola oil to dramatically change the health value.

More Cluck And Less Moo In Menu: While you're paging through the recipe book, look for menu items that call for ground beef or pork and replace them with ground chicken or turkey breast. Tonight, I'm making chili with shredded chicken breast instead of beef. It's just as flavorful and much better for us. Italian marinara sauces for spaghetti and lasagna are very good with chicken breast instead of beef. Ever had turkey enchiladas? Yum! For stew, hamburgers and meatloaf, you can add a little Kitchen Bouquet to get a more beefy color and flavor out of chicken. If you must have pizza (as I must), make it out of sour dough French bread and use vegetable or chicken marinara, low fat mozzarella cheese and low fat salami. It's very tasty, with 1/3 the fat of regular pizza...and kids love it. In your menu planning, add more chicken dishes and fewer beef, lamb or pork. You can still have your old favorites...just less often.

Shallow Frying Foods: Some say not to fry...I say, why not? Just don't deep-fry. With the skin on, a chicken will fry nicely without adding any more fat than a little spritz on the pan. By the way, if you're concerned about those aerosol oils, just get a vegetable spritzer in the cooking utensils area, fill it with canola oil and use it to spritz your pans. Stir-frying has become my favorite Spring-Summer-Fall cooking method (Winter is soup season). With both stir-frying and homemade soups, a tiny amount of meat goes a long way in a mountain of vegetables. This eliminates most of the fat. Add flavor by using lots of garlic, ginger, and aromatic herbs, like fennel and basil.

Oils-A Slippery Issue: If you're like me, you have trouble keeping up with which oils are good and which are bad. I've finally settled on two...Canola Oil For cooking, Omega 3 fish oils for supplementation. I haven't tried the new dressings and cooking oils with Omega 3's in them. Can't get past the price! For lower fat intake, it's easier to just reduce the amounts you use than to become an expert in fatty acids. On the subject of oils...there are so many good fat-free dressings and sauces now, there should be no sacrifice in flavor for salads and sandwiches.

Plan Snacks: What makes snacks so tempting is you can just grab them and eat. So, replace pastry snacks with fruit, replace chips with crackers, Use low fat microwave popcorn. Plan ahead and bake pita bread or tortillas with spices and flavorings to replace chips. Salsa is already low fat. Make sugar-free instant pudding or gelatin and keep it on hand instead of ice cream. A good substitute I use for dip is low fat, chunky Bleu cheese salad dressing. Mmmmm!*I hope I've given you some good ideas on how to reduce the fat in your diet without reducing the flavor. Now that I've finished this article I'm gonna go fix something to eat. Hungry?

Glen Williams is Webmaster for http://www.e-health-fitness.com, founder and CEO of EHF, Inc. He has done extensive research on personal and family health and fitness issues and has been helping and advising people on health since 1987. You can comment on his articles at Health And Fitness Forums.

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