Cooking up a healthier home

This past week, the Dietitians Association of Australia has been promoting its Healthy Weight Week initiative, now in its 10th year, writes Kirsty Fairbairn.

This year, the campaign focuses on healthy home-cooking, which is one of the best ways to boost your nutrient intake.

This year’s message is that home-cooking is the road straight to better health. Did you know you are more likely to eat smaller portions, and thus fewer kilojoules, fat, salt and sugar, when you eat at home? When you feel you might have cooked more than you need for dinner, try saving some for lunch the following day. Add a salad to get extra volume in your lunch and boost your nutrient intake at the same time.

While it is easy to grab take-out food on the run, takeaways and processed foods are more likely to be low in the valuable nutrients needed for the health and growth of our children.

Food preparation is also an important life skill to teach our children. Research suggests that adolescents with better food knowledge and more experience in food preparation will have healthier dietary practices. We can use the home environment to show children that cooking at home is a key aspect of self-care. In addition, if children see their parents cooking at home, it sets a much healthier norm for them as adults, as they will then expect that this is how you live when you are independent.

Let children help out in meal preparation: start off by letting them help you wash vegetables, or get ingredients for you, or help to cook oats on a winter’s morning. Take them to the markets or the grocery store occasionally (this can take patience and is easier with older children) so that they learn where food comes from, and then see you prepare it at home. Children absorb these memories, reaching for them at a later time they need to feed themselves.

Home-cooking is a fantastic way to ensure your family eats more vegetables. The latest New Zealand Health Survey Update found that the baby-boomers are the stars of the vegetable world, and the rest of us have some work to do to catch up. Could it be their penchant for veges that keeps them living so long?

Over a third of Kiwi adults are not eating the recommended three serves of veges a day. This can be done by eating two serves at dinner, and another at either lunch or as a snack during the day. One serve of vegetables equates to half a cup of cooked vegetables or salad, or one medium potato or equivalent of another starchy vege such as taro or kumara.

The cheapest way to access vegetables is to grow your own. We are lucky in New Zealand in that we can grow a wonderful variety of vegetables pretty easily in our own backyard, and have easy access to fantastic locally grown foods at our farmers markets.

A really easy way to add veges to your diet is to slice carrot sticks, cucumber, capsicum, celery sticks, some grape or cherry tomatoes, or cut up any vege you fancy and keep it in an airtight container in the fridge, ready for snacking. It helps if you are aware of when you tend to get "peckish" during the day, and head for the vege snack about 30 minutes before that. You will curb your hunger nicely and at the same time get some body-boosting nutrients in. Dip them in a hummus or a cottage cheese-based dip and you also add valuable legumes or calcium to your diet!

Cooking meat, fish and poultry at home also gives you much greater control of the amount of fat that you consume. You can choose lean meat to purchase, you can prepare it how you want to using low-fat cooking methods, and you can control how much salt or sodium is used in cooking. In contrast, processed meat or meat prepared outside the home is often laden with saturated fat and sodium, both of which are significant contributors to your risk of heart disease.

Thankfully, cooking is enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

Across the Tasman, Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food cooking workshops have boosted the cooking confidence of participants, which has in turn led to greater fruit and vegetable consumption, and a reduction in takeway food consumption. Growing your own "repertoire" of nutritious meals that you feel comfortable preparing also adds much appreciated variety and new foods to your diet. Luckily, we don’t all have to be a master chef to achieve that!

- Dr Kirsty Fairbairn is a health, wellness and sports dietitian at Invigorate Nutrition (www.invigoratenutrition.com), based at Eclipse Health, Wellness and Performance, Hanover St, Dunedin.