How you cook it makes a difference

Sometimes it isn’t only what you eat, but how you cook it that matters. We all know we need to eat good food to have a good body. We need to stay away from the sugars and flours, and things made from them, as well as the chips and other things found in the snack food isle. But how many of us spoil our efforts of making good, wholesome food?

There are some people that say we should only eat raw foods. Some of their theory is good.

Enzymes and certain nutrients are lost by cooking. There are some foods that the nutrients aren’t lost, but are actually made more available for digestion. Based on this my basic philosophy is to eat a mix of cooked and raw foods. That way you get the best of both, but the cooking methods do count.

Boiling the life out of vegetables and throwing away the water doesn’t do anybody any good. You have killed the enzymes, leached the vitamins and minerals into the water, and then thrown it away. Lightly steaming is a much better alternative.

Grilling was long thought to be a good way of cooking. The thought was that since the fats dripped down into the flames and burned away that we were doing something good for our bodies, until someone realized that the black crusty pieces that taste so good can cause cancer. Not a very healthy way of cooking.

Anyone with common sense will tell you that deep fat frying things is not a good way to cook them. The fats commonly used in frying are rancid due to the type of fats and the high heats. The breading on items or the things that are starchy to begin with absorbs those fats in abundance, and extra calories with no nutritional purpose.

Microwave ovens were long looked at as a form of steaming your foods. Unfortunately that isn’t the way they actually work. They use a form of radiation to excite the moisture in the food, causing it to expand, or explode into the surrounding tissues. Laboratory tests show that the nutrients are destroyed or changed into a form that the human body cannot assimilate. All we get from microwaved foods are empty calories. There is some evidence that the structure of the changed molecules increase the chances of cancer.

Stir frying using coconut oil or organic butter is a good option for some foods. The one caution with this type of cooking is the pan you use. The ‘teflon’ coated nonstick pans have been shown to give off chemicals that are hazardous to our health. Not only do we breathe these chemicals but there are particles of the coating that break off every time you use the pan. There are some newer nonstick pans that are lined with ceramic that work just as well, without the dangerous side effects.

How do I cook?

Usually I go by the concept of low and slow. This means at our house we frequently smoke our meats. This is a method of using warm smoke to surround the meat. The fats never come in contact with the flames, so there is no cancer causing substances formed.

The other way we cook is in a crock pot. We put the leftover bones from our smoked meats into a crock pot along with chopped vegetables and filtered water in the morning. When we come home from work we have a luscious and healthy soup waiting for us. This is great in the winter. In the summer we eat a lot more salads, sometimes with meat and sometimes with nuts and cheese as the protein. We make our own dressings to avoid the chemicals in the packaged brands.