Low Fat Cooking

Though fat is a part of our daily nutrition intake, most people are prone to eat an excess amount of fat in their diets. Switching over to low fat cooking can help people reduce the amount of fat they eat, can help maintain a healthy body weight, can help prevent disease and may potentially increase one's life span.

There are four simple ways that a person can immediately introduce low fat cooking in their diet. These are trimming the fat off meat, switching to low-fat dairy products, using butter or margarine sparingly and changing cooking methods from roasting or frying to steaming or stir-frying. A person should attempt to eat fewer eggs, cheese and other dairy products, and cut down on red meat and chicken. These foods are high in saturated fats and contribute to heart disease.

Why Avoid Carbohydrates?

If people find it difficult to exclude meat from their lives, using low fat cooking techniques can help to promote the removal of fat. A meat-based sauce or stew, for instance, can be cooked a day ahead and stored overnight in the refrigerator, to allow the fat to rise to the top of the dish and solidify for easy removal. Using more vegetables in stews can also help to reduce the amount of fat in the overall dish.

A way to reduce your intake of saturated fats is to substitute olive oil or sunflower oil for butter and tropical oils in low fat cooking. Although these oils have as many calories as saturated oils, they have a different effect on how cholesterol is broken down in your body - a major factor in heart disease.

Certain fish oils are particularly beneficial and contain a class of essential fatty acids known as omega-3 fatty acids. These help to lower cholesterol and reduce the blood's ability to clog up arteries. As you adopt more and more low fat cooking methods, cooking ocean fish, such as mackerel, herring, tuna, sardines and salmon can all be used for their richness in this type of oil. The more and more a person's learns about where there are hidden fats in their daily cooking habits, the more aware they can be about adopting better low fat cooking methods. Trying to avoid things like deep fat frying, excessive amounts of butter or saturated oils in cooking, the fatty skin on all kinds of meat or copious amounts of gravy can help lower cholesterol levels and contribute to all over health.

Having a balanced diet with ample amount of exercise can change your life significantly. The old American diet of roasted meat and potatoes is being gradually replaced by low fat cooking rich in vitamins and unsaturated fats. It seems that people are living longer than they ever have, and this is largely due to our advances in medicine and our emerging knowledge of what we eat and how it affects our bodies.

Article by S.R. Harrison an independent writer for Healthy Help Files on Weight Loss & Diet Issues.

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