Beginner's Guide to Healthy Cooking

Video Transcript

RACHAEL RICHARDSON: Hi. I'm Rachael Richardson, and I'm a registered dietitian and a licensed nutritionist. I'm from Nutrolution, Inc., and we are located in Miami, Florida. This is the beginner's guide to healthy cooking. Healthy cooking actually begins with healthy grocery shopping, so make sure when you go to grocery store that you're buying healthy foods, you're buying whole foods and you're buying all the foods that you need to prepare healthy food. So one trick, you maybe have heard before is to shop around the perimeter of the grocery store and that's where you find all of your natural whole foods. So your vegetables and fruits, your eggs, your nuts, your poultry and your meat and your oils, so those are the best foods to kind of focus on. Some tips that my clients love are to make sure that you are doing some batch cooking, and batch cooking is when you make a huge batch of something that you enjoy and then you can use it throughout the week because we find that one of the biggest obstacles that people have to healthy cooking and healthy eating essentially is the time that it takes to prepare their foods. So you can make a big batch, say, of chicken legs and a big batch of brown rice and a big bowl of--a huge bowl of salad and keep those things in your fridge and eat them throughout the week for three or four meals for you and your family even. Other tips for healthy cooking are to make sure that you're using a good amount of healthy fat in your cooking, and that's going to offset the need for extra sugars and extra artificial flavors. Another tip for healthy cooking is to make sure that you're really using a lot of herbs and spices to flavor your food instead of salt or other processed foods. Five points to remember are start with healthy shopping; use herbs and vegetables for flavoring; use healthy fats in your cooking; batch cook; and have fun cooking.