Are you choosing recipes to dish out dishes or to dish out health? Recipes are much more than combining a bunch of ingredients on a cook top. Recipes are indispensable and delicious ways to bring together the rich array of nutrients found in ingredients and pack them with a healthy punch. Recipes help transform ingredients using methods like kneading, roasting, stir-frying, steaming simmering and baking into to irresistible mouth watering dishes with textures, flavors, and aromas. It would be impossible make the tough textures of protein ingredients like paneer or cottage cheese and legumes melt in your mouth if it weren't for recipes and their cooking methods.
Recipes Using Right Cooking Techniques
Choosing the right cooking techniques for recipes is one of the most important things you must look for in a recipe. The right cooking process and technique will help preserve nutrition for a healthy diet and for a good health. Deep frying is probably the worst form of cooking methods, especially if the oil is used more than once.
Cook vegetables either by steaming or using the pressure cooker. If a vegetable can be steamed or precooked before wok frying, then you must do that. The nutrition is retained and hence you are making sure the food that you take in is healthy too and not void from vitamins. Most importantly, choose recipes that let you bake, roast, steam or stir-fry your foods.
Recipes Using High-fiber Carbohydrates
High fiber food types from grains like oats, brown rice, millets, whole-wheat based dishes, flax seeds, nuts and a wide variety of vegetables would be just mere high fiber ingredients and carbohydrates without recipes. A high fiber diet along with adequate fluid intake moves quickly and relatively easily through our digestive tract and helps it function properly. A high-fiber diet may also help reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
High fiber diets are more filling and give a sense of fullness sooner than an animal and meat based diet does. Rethink how you place the various foods on your dinner plate. Reducing the portions of the meat with equal or more portions of vegetables, legumes and fruits portion always allows for more fiber for good health.
Recipes Using Proteins
The addition of beans like Rajma, Green Moong, Chick Peas, Soy-based products, Low Fat Milk based products, Nuts and Seeds in balanced quantities helps to supply a good proteins to our body. Protein can help you shed those unwanted pounds, but it's important to eat the right amount and the right kind of protein to get its health benefits. Consuming proteins does not always have to be with dals, paneer based sabzi's but can also be in the form of energy bars, smoothies and when a yogurt-based dish.
Research shows that including a source of protein like an egg or Greek yogurt at breakfast along with a high fiber grain like whole wheat toast can help you feel full longer and eat less throughout the day.
Recipes Using Omega 3 Nutrition
Research says need omega-3 fatty acids for numerous normal body functions, such as controlling blood clotting and building cell membranes in the brain, and since our bodies cannot make omega-3 fats, we must get them through food. Omega-3 fatty acids are also associated with many health benefits, including protection against heart disease and possibly stroke.
Omegas are a type of polyunsaturated fatty acids. They are called “essential” fatty acids because the body needs them but can’t manufacture them, so we have to get them from our diet. It is virtually impossible to get too much omega-3 from your diet. Apart from fish, eating other good sources of omega-3s, such as ground flaxseed (powder), pumpkin seeds, walnuts and soy nuts provide a good source of Omega-3 to our diet.
You can include flaxseed in the form of powder in smoothies and include the nuts in your salads. Make sure you eat the flaxseeds and nuts in its unroasted form so you can pack in the complete Omega-3 nutrients into your system.
Recipes Using Vitamins & Minerals
Recipes that include several colors and vegetables in them like the red and yellow peppers, bright red tomatoes and purple cabbage, avocados, orange and bright colored vegetables along with nuts and sunflower seeds help you to enjoy rich doses vitamins and minerals. You can have these vegetables in a variety of forms like - Juices, Smoothies, Stir-Frys, traditional Indian Sabzi's and the like. Make sure when you cook these vegetables you use the right cooking techniques to retain the nutrition content in the fruits and vegetables. Over cooking, deep frying and reheating food, makes them lose their color and also destroys some of the nutrients and vitamins present in them.
Clearly, recipes are much more than just dishing out dishes. They are an exciting way to bring a whole new world of health, energy and a rich dose of nutrition to your lifestyle.
Here are some ways you can choose your recipes smartly to achieve your health goals
1. For Weight Loss, look for recipes that show you best practices with baking, grilling, steaming, stir-frying and roasting. Cold and hot soups, multi-colored salads, skimmed paneer and yogurt and sprout based recipes used as a part of a balanced diet can help you regulate your weight.
2. To Lower Elevated Blood Cholesterol, look for recipes that include high soluble fiber grains like oats, brown rice and finger millet or nachni. A tablespoon of almonds or pumpkin seeds or 1 teaspoon flax seeds also help to regulate elevated blood cholesterol levels.
3. Thumb Rule To Create Healthy Recipes, remember that recipes that use a rich variety of food groups like carbohydrates, proteins and fats, vitamins and minerals promote the best health. A single bite of a skimmed paneer or tofu and vegetable wrap with kidney beans quinoa and pine nuts could provide similar benefits like a roti, subzi and dal.
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