Nation News has teamed up with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados to bring you tips for healthier eating.
Start next week with a plan for healthy meals.
Planning your weekly meals before shopping is a good strategy to ensure your grocery trip is efficient and when you get home you don’t have that feeling of ‘wait, what I going cook now I spent all this money?’
Making a plan for family meals is easy and exciting; consider the wholesome favourite foods of the family, including fruit and vegetables and follow our tips.
That feeling of ‘ahhh what to cook?’ often ends up in ‘let me just fry this thing here quick’ or meals that are not balanced. Planning meals in a systematic way helps to keep you on track with heart-healthy nutritious meals daily, which include all the food groups in appropriate portions.
Avoid frying foods. This method of meal preparation increases the caloric content significantly adding 9 calories for every gram of fat absorbed. Think about the oil left in the pan compared to when you started – this was absorbed into the food. Reducing consumption of foods fried or with added fats is a heart-healthy habit.
Select dishes you can bake/oven roast. Baking proteins, carbohydrates and veggies is an excellent method of meal preparation as it increases flavour whilst offering many health benefits. Whatever your dish, make sure you know the goal is half the plate should be vegetables every day of the week.
Experiment and try new or unfamiliar flavours like dill and fenugreek. Be diverse in the combinations of herbs, spices and marinades used to tantalise your palate – e.g. coriander, wine and ginger. Remember a plan facilitates time to marinate and season foods prior to cooking which tremendously improves flavour when reducing use of salt based seasonings – a health promoting practice.
Send us a photo of your healthy meal today. We’ll be waiting to see what’s cooking healthy in your kitchen. Tag us @nation246 on Instagram.
Kimberley Rudder MSc., Nutrition Consultant, Heart & Stroke Foundation of Barbados
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