What a Family Needs to Know About Eating Well And Being Clever with Food
This book was written by Sarah Scotland, Freelance Nutritionist and Founder of Wise about Food. Copyright 2015 by Sarah Scotland All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from Wise About Food Ltd except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Illustrations by Jenny Scotland
I would like to thank everyone I have worked with in various children's centres that has given me the confidence and the courage to write this booklet. I feels very honoured to have met so many amazing people and I hope that my knowledge and experience can be useful to others through this booklet.
Contents Introduction... 3 Nutrition Basics... 5 Cooking From Scratch... 8 Ways to cook more healthily... 12 Eating as a family... 13 Staples to have in the cupboard... 15 Eating Fruit and Vegetables... 19 How to Cook on a Budget... 21 Recipes... 22 2
Introduction This booklet will help you see that living a healthy lifestyle does not have to be hard work or expensive. Where are you starting from? The changes you make do not have to be big and they do not have to happen all at once. Here are a few questions to ask yourself: How often do you cook ready-meals How often do you cook using jars or packets? How often do you cook from scratch? How much do spend on food a week? How much food do you throw food away? Where do you want to get to? In an ideal world we would all love to cook delicious meals from scratch just like the cooks do on the television. In the real world we are too busy or haven t got the ingredients or don t feel our cooking is up to it. This is a shame because if we could cook from scratch, not every night perhaps, but as often as possible then the benefits are huge. You will know exactly what is in your food. You will be able to monitor the fat, sugar and salt content in your food and improve your diet. You can use leftover food to make more nutritious meals. You can add extra vegetables to the meals that you cook to increase your intake of 5 a day. You can increase the amount of fibre in your diet: we all eat too little. 3
Your children will be able to get involved, helping to choose meals, buy the food and even help cook! You can become more confident with your cooking and think about ideas of your own and have fun experimenting with foods and flavours. What the recipes will do for you The recipes in this book are a mixture of tried and tested favourites that parents have had fun cooking on my courses. The most successful recipe was home-made pizza. It really is the easiest thing to make. You can have great fun making it with your children choosing toppings and rolling out the bases. It is also cheap and dead healthy! 4
Nutrition Basics If you buy lots of jars and ready meals, have you ever thought about what ingredients they contain? Often they contain extra calories such as sugars and fats and high amounts of salt. What are the implications on you and your children's health? Food Labels The recommended amounts for adults: Fat 70g Sugar 35g Salt 6g Take the time to look at the food labels and ingredients on a few packets and jars you regularly use and see what you are really eating. Here is an example of a food label, this one for Low Fat Toffee Yoghurt which comes in a 175g pot: Typical values Per 100g Energy 218KJ (51kcal) Protein 4.1g Carbohydrate 7.9g of which sugars 7.1g Starch 76g Fat 0.1g of which saturates 0.1g Salt 0.2g 5
The nutrition information is given as Typical Values usually for 100g of the product. But what is the size of the product and how much of it is one person likely to eat? This can be difficult to assess. Often a portion size is given too, but how realistic is this? Because these calculations are difficult to do the colour coding system was introduced. This is what the colour-coding on a food label means: Look for these amounts on a food label Fat per 100g Green Low below 3g Amber Medium 3g to 20g Red High above 20g Sugar per 100g Green Low below 5g Amber Medium 5g to 15g Red High above 15g Salt per 100g Green Low below 0.3g Amber Medium 0.3 to 1.5g Red High above 1.5g When you read a food label, ideally you are looking for one that is all green! Making Sense of It All If we were to apply these bands to our toffee yoghurt we would find that it would indeed have Green for fat as we would expect of a low-fat brand. However it would have Amber for sugar warning us that it is not as healthy as we might like to think. 6
We also need to think about our total daily intake which the colour coding doesn t help us with. Remember that the typical values are per 100g however the yoghurt pot is actually 175g. Toffee Yogurt 175g We need to do some maths to work out that the yoghurt has 12g of sugar in the pot. This is the same as three sugar cubes. Your recommended daily sugar intake is 35g. What else will you be eating in a day? Look at the Energy amount in kcal for how many Calories are present. Some other useful information from the food label: The amount of Saturates is shown separately from Fats in general because high amounts of Saturated Fats cause particular problems with health over the long term. Have a go yourself - look at some products that you buy regularly and read the labels. Work out how many grams there are of fat, sugar and salt in what you eat. You will be surprised! 7
Cooking From Scratch Cooking from scratch is so easy and it means that you are able to decide what goes into your body! The Benefits The benefits that you will get out of eating a healthy balanced diet cannot be emphasised more. When you start eating fruit and vegetables regularly, drinking more water and exercising more, your body will say a great big thank you! What are the benefits of eating more healthily and exercising more? You will feel vibrant! You will have plenty of energy for the day. Your concentration levels will be higher, making it easier to learn and focus on work. You will achieve more at work. There will be extra energy to play with the children as well as having time for yourself. You will shed unwanted weight gain. Your blood pressure will be more controlled. Your cholesterol will be controlled. Remember to drink plenty of water, You will feel so much better about yourself and ultimately enjoy everyday life much more! 8
Can It Be Done? Some common reasons I hear about not cooking from scratch, and buying ready meals/takeaways are: 'I have kids', 'I don't have the time', 'it's too expensive'. Let's think about how we can solve these problems. As parents our children take up a lot of our time and often meals are the last thing on our minds. However meals are so important, not just in terms of what is eaten but also how they are eaten. Try and plan your week ahead, and in doing so you will end up less stressed with more time, and hopefully more money in your purse, as well as feeling healthier! So how to achieve this? Plan the week's meals and use ingredients for one night s meal to make another. Example: Sunday night you have a roast dinner. Buy a bigger than usual chicken and then use the rest on Tuesday to make a chicken pie. 9
The chicken might be more expensive in the beginning but you have saved money as it would be cheaper than buying chicken breasts and you saved time as you are halfway there, as the chicken is already cooked. Make life a little easier - save the gravy and the vegetables, and mix them together for the pie filling. Another example: Monday night you make some roasted vegetables. Make double or triple and use them in meals later that week, for instance in a pasta or couscous salad, or mix with a tin of tomatoes for a tomato sauce. A few tips of mine: Have a staples cupboard and always keep topped up (see below for ideas). Have a cooking session and keep a few meals ready in the fridge. This makes life so easy and saves on the washing up! Use the freezer - it's sitting there perhaps full of ice cream and chicken nuggets. Fill it with yummy homemade foods! Cook in batches and freeze. Make a large batch of tomato sauce and freeze it in portions. This helps make quick meals such as bases for pizzas, bolognaise sauces and casseroles. Being Confident to cook If you were to cook from scratch, how much fat, sugar and salt would you use? Would you really add lots of sugar to a tomato sauce? You could some soy sauce instead, it gives a great flavour and is much healthier. Would you really load a pizza with so much cheese as you get with a ready-made packet or frozen one? If you were making your own 10
you could use a low fat cheese or smaller amounts of stronger flavoured cheese so you could gradually reduce the amount and try different flavours. When we buy food, we just accept the way it is made - that is until we start making our own food and realise how tasty some of the other flavours are and how they have been masked by the overwhelming fats and sugars in bought meals. 11