Nutrition expert Sandra Viele shares tips on improving the nutritional value of your diet.
- Cooking low-fat doesn't mean you have to give up delicious flavors like olive oil or butter. Try using flavored nonstick sprays instead, in all cooking or baking pans.
- Reduce butter or shortening in most recipes by replacing all or part of it with pureed fruit such as bananas or applesauce.
- Wait until your toast, bread or waffles cool down to butter them. This way the butter doesn't melt into the item, you use less, and it still gives you the taste of butter with a lot less fat.
- Try substituting low-fat options for butter on toast, vegetables and potatoes. Use herb-flavored olive oil for a delicious gourmet-style alternative. Also, try flavored mustards or salsa as a delicious nonfat topping on potatoes.
- Chutneys make a wonderful accompaniment for all types of vegetables and create new flavor sensations.
- Use fruit spreads without any butter on toast or bread. Eliminating the butter altogether on pancakes and waffles make these very healthy and low-fat foods.
- Limit your intake of bakery products that are very rich. Scones, croissants, biscuits, muffins and some cookies are very high in saturated fat. Instead, try things like whole-grain rolls, bagels, breads and muffins made with applesauce instead of butter.
- You don't need huge portions to get your protein requirement. When you eat meat, trim off all visible fat, and limit your portion to three ounces. This is about the size of a deck of cards or an average-size fist.
- Salad dressing packs a wallop of fat. Each tablespoon typically has 15 grams of fat, and the average person uses four tablespoons on a salad. That's a whole day's worth of fat in one sitting.
- Try putting the dressing on the side, and dip your fork in it before picking up a bite of salad. You still taste it, but you use far less. Also, try the low-fat dressings to save even more on the fat grams, or use flavored olive oil and vinegar or salsa.
- Buy leaner cuts and grades of meat. Ask the butcher to trim off the external fat.
- Grilling, broiling and braising are good ways to cook meat that reduce the fat. Drain the fat off of fried ground meats when using them in recipes.
