Healthy cooking: 7 bad habits to avoid

In the kitchen we spend many hours. There we store food, prepare it, cook it and even eat it. That is why it is not surprising that if we do not have good habits our health can suffer.

In today's article we are going to see that there are some bad habits to avoid in the kitchen. For a healthy kitchen it is necessary to take into account different aspects, many times before starting to eat. Everything so that our meals and eating habits are the best possible.

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The 7 bad habits that we must eradicate for a healthy kitchen

Despite the rhythm of life we ​​lead, it is important to establish good habits around food. Many of these take place in the kitchen, the space in which we cook but also organize our food.

Next we are going to see what are the best tips to make our kitchen the healthiest possible. We will learn to avoid and replace different bad habits that decrease the quality of our diet.

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1. Not planning meals in advance

Planning menus in advance is proven to make eating better. Oddly enough, if we do not plan the purchase and what we are going to eat every day, the tendency is to eat worse.

Improvisation and quick fixes lead us to foods with a less healthy nutritional profile. Many are the occasions when some people choose to make do with anything at the last minute. This makes different types of products and cooking out of your diet.

2. Food distribution in the kitchen

It may seem silly, but our choices when it comes to eating one food or another are going to be conditioned by how easy it is to see them in the kitchen. If we do not have certain foods in sight, we will not remember so much to consume them.

For example, having fruit in a cupboard instead of a basket on the counter makes us eat less fruit. And this is applicable to any type of food. For example, it is different to store lentils in the closet at eye level than at foot level.

In supermarkets they know these types of rules very well and use them to condition our purchase.

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3. Cook "by eye"

Respecting the measurements when cooking is important. Sometimes we cook more than we can eat, although the biggest problem is if we don't respect the amounts in the recipes and add more of certain ingredients. In fact, in some cases it is better to reduce the amounts that come as a reference.

For example, in many dessert recipes there is a lot of sugar or butter. It is almost a cultural custom to add so much of these ingredients. Obviously the result is tastier, but not so much quantity is necessary.

4. Too much salt

Salt is another substance that we must ration and that deserves a separate chapter. This substance improves the palatability of our meals, but represents a high risk to our health. It has been calculated that in Western societies we are ingesting ten times more salt than our body needs, and that is counterproductive.

Salt promotes health problems, hypertension being the best known of them. Good measures to reduce salt are to remove the salt shaker from the table and substitute the salt for spices when cooking. Eating with too much salt is one of the most common bad habits to avoid for healthy cooking

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5. Bring ready meals to the table

Preparing ready-to-eat dishes is a good habit for a number of reasons **. First of all, it makes the proportions between some foods and others on the plates correct. If not, we could tend to eat more meat than vegetables, for example.

On the other hand, by visualizing the amount we should eat on the plate, we reduce the temptation to repeat or finish the plate. Given that we have a normal portion in front of us, it is easier to understand that we should not eat more or that we should finish the plate. In a healthy kitchen, that we like the dish more or less should not be a reason to eat more or less.

6. "Chop" after hours

Snacking between meals or eating while we are preparing food is very counterproductive. It is a way to add extra calories to our diet, and it is that we chop more cheese than lettuce, make no mistake

Eating like this promotes hormonal lack of control regarding the feeling of hunger and satiety. We must eat at the hours destined to eat or we can develop anxiety related to food and being overweight.

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7. Eating too much fried

Frying food is an unhealthy way of cooking even though the food is tasty. We must limit the times we eat fried dishes, since those who eat a lot of fried dishes are more likely to develop different diseases.

The food we fry is dipped in oil, which is very caloric. These foods gain 10% of their initial weight after frying, that is, we are eating the food and a significant part of the oil. It not only changes the external appearance of the product, it penetrates.

Bibliographic references

• Adrià, F., Fuster, V.; Corbella, J. (2010). The kitchen of health. Barcelona: Ed. Planeta.

• Miralpeix, A. (2001). Prepare your menus for the whole week. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori.

• Nestle, M. (2006). What to Eat. New York: North Point Press.