We spend many hours in the kitchen. That’s where we store food, prepare it, cook it and even eat it. So 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 cuisine 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.
In spite of the rhythm of life that we take it is important to establish good habits around the feeding.. Many of these are developed in the kitchen, the space in which we cook but also organize our food.
Here we are going to see which are the best tips to make our kitchen as healthy as possible. We will learn how to avoid and replace different bad habits that diminish the quality of our food.
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1. Not planning meals in advance
It has been proven that planning menus in advance makes you eat better.. Believe it or not, if we do not consciously 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 meals with a less healthy nutritional profile. Many are the occasions when some people choose to make do with anything at the last minute. This causes different types of products and cooking to be left out of their diet.
2. Food distribution in the kitchen
It may seem silly, but our choices when it comes to eating one food or another will be conditioned by how easy it is to see them in the kitchen. If we don’t have certain foods in sight, we won’t remember to eat them as much..
For example, having fruit in a cupboard instead of in a basket on the counter makes us eat less fruit. And this applies to any type of food. For example, it is different to keep lentils in the cupboard at eye level than at foot level.
In the supermarkets they know very well this type of rules and they use them to condition our purchase.
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3. Cooking “by eye”.
Respecting the measurements when cooking is important.. Sometimes we cook more than we can eat, although the biggest problem is if we do not respect the quantities of the recipes and add more of certain ingredients. In fact, in some cases it is better to reduce the quantities that come as a reference.
For example, many dessert recipes contain 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 it is not necessary to add so much.
4. Too much salt
Salt is another substance that should be rationed and 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 replace salt with 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. Bringing ready-to-eat dishes to the table
Preparing ready-to-eat dishes is a good habit for several reasons**. First of all, it makes sure that the proportions of foods on the plate are correct. Otherwise, we might tend to eat more meat than vegetables, for example.
On the other hand, visualizing the amount we should eat on the plate reduces the temptation to repeat or finish the dish. 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, the fact that we like the dish more or less should not be a reason to eat more or less.
6. “Snacking” out of hours
Snacking between meals or eating while we are preparing the meal is very counterproductive.. It is a way to add extra calories to our diet, and we eat more cheese than lettuce, let’s not fool ourselves.
Eating in this way promotes hormonal dyscontrol with respect to the sensation of hunger and satiety. We must eat at the times we are supposed to eat or we can develop anxiety linked to food and become overweight.
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7. Eating too much fried food
Frying food is an unhealthy way of cooking even if the food is tasty.. We should limit the number of times we eat fried dishes, since those who eat a lot of fried food are more likely to develop different diseases.
The food we fry is submerged in oil, which is very caloric. These foods gain 10% of their initial weight after frying, i.e., we are eating the food and a significant part of the oil. Not only does it change the external appearance of the product, but it penetrates.