If the recipes from MasterChef TV show had nutrition panels, how would they rate compared with fast food burgers?

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MasterChef has changed the viewing habits of many 1000s of people including those of my clients.

But because I have not paid much attention to the show I thought I better do some homework, so for a week I studied the show and the recipes. As a qualified dietitian, I can comment expertly on the nutritional quality, so I performed a nutritional analysis of a few sample main meal recipes that are available online or in store at the sponsoring supermarket.

The results? Well I think you are going to be seriously shocked.

I have compared the recipes per serve for savoury meals with popular burgers from the big fast food/quick service outlets and a quick home-cooked meal of steak and vegetables.

The table below says it all, but in short, far too many calories and kilojoules for everyday meals, far too much salt, sometimes too few vegetables or salad, and often too much saturated fat.

  • If your goal is to lose weight, then your total daily kJ target might be in the range of 6000 (1400 cals) to 7500 kJ (1800 cals). A general rule of thumb is to keep the main course under or around 2000 kJ (480 cals) for weight loss plans. The recipes assessed contained more fuel (kJ and cals) than a Big Mac.
  • Healthy adults should not consume more than 2300 mg of sodium daily. If you have high blood pressure, then the target is lower – just 1600mg daily is the suggested maximum dietary target. There is more salt in some restaurant meals than there is in fast food burgers! And that’s before you add any extra at the table.
  • Unless you order a side plate of vegetables and salad, don’t assume or expect to be getting anywhere near enough vegetables or salad for good health.

 

Per serve Beef Stroganoff with Parsley and Black Pepper Fettuccine Cauliflower Soup with Poached Eggs Korean Rice Burger with Seared tuna with Confit Potatoes and Sambal Hungry Jack’s Whopper McDonald’s Big Mac Home cooked pan cooked 150 g steak, potato & vegetables
KJ 3920 5220 3905 2490 2880 2060 1630
Calories 940 1250 930 595  690 490 390
Total fat g 47 96 36 36 41 27 9
Saturated fat g 15 38 7 8 11 10 3
Sodium mg 730 1180 2900 290 941 958 120
Fibre g 4.4 29.5 9.3 7.8 Not stated Not stated 7.7
Vegetable per 1/2 cup serve 1/4 serve 6 serves 2 serves 1 serve Not stated Not stated 4 serves

Masterchef(TM) is a trade mark of Fremantle Media Australia Pty Ltd. McDonald’s(TM) and Big Mac(TM) are trade marks of the McDonald’s Corporation. Hungry Jack’s® is a franchise of the international Burger KingTM Corporation and Whopper® is a trade mark of this group. The MasterChef recipes, burger profiles and steak meal were analysed using professional dietary analysis software in June 2011.

These rounded values and are very conservative. I have generously assumed total evaporation of alcohol with cooking, that very little oil is absorbed in some steps of recipes where excess is to be discarded, and that pickling liquid is totally drained. In other words, the kilojoule and calorie values are likely to be even higher than calculated.

There are many valuable lessons to be learnt about the nutritional value of high-end restaurant meals but before I explore those, take a look at the some of the positives and negatives of cooking shows that dominate TV viewing.

What are the positives of cooking shows in general?

1. TV cooking shows highlight the talent, patience, time management and coordination skills that are needed to be a leading chef.

2. Cooking for your family is one thing, but cooking for an unknown audience of taste-testers everyday is a demanding, stressful, skilful occupation that’s performed under big pressure.

3. There is a lot of research, failed recipes along the way and practice needed to develop and create original recipes.

4. If you get a failure in the kitchen at home, this doesn’t mean you are a bad cook – it just means you need a little more practice and perhaps a recipe to follow.

5. The use of fresh ingredients and teaching of safe food handling techniques for cooking at home is brilliant.

6. How a meal looks is almost as important as how it tastes – appearance does matter. It can turn an ordinary meal into a meal that gains compliments from all those served.

7. Tasting food rather than gulping it down allows you to decide whether the food is worth eating or not.

8. Take the time with the initial bites to get past the appearance, price and expectations and get down to the nitty gritty question that you’ll ask yourself: ‘how nice is this for me?’

9. Understand that it takes time to prepare a beautiful meal and that the act of preparing a meal forms part of the pleasure of dining or serving your guests and family.

10. There are many great celebrity chefs and cooking shows that produce family and body friendly recipes – you just need to be cautious about which recipes you decide to tackle in your own home.

Who is my all time favourite celebrity cook? It has to be Ainsley Harriott (although I have not seen him on TV recently). Ainlsey. You can come and cook for me anytime!

The negatives?

1. Unless you’ve got a kitchen hand or big dishwasher, cleaning up after cooking restaurant quality meals will take forever – chefs use lots and lots of little bowls and dishes to make sure ingredients are correct and ready to add. Their ovens are ready to go and don’t need ages of time to heat up.

2. Viewers have to realise that MasterChef recipes are definitely not family friendly everyday recipes. What with times of close to 70 minutes needed to prepare and get dinner on the table, I would be serving meals at 8 or 9 pm. Possibly even later if I had to detour into the supermarket to get fresh groceries and specific ingredients on the way home from work. I was exhausted just looking at the long lists of ingredients in the Official MasterChef Recipes. So feel relieved to know that you are definitely not an inferior or inadequate person if you don’t cook this way every night.

So, what are some of the bigger lessons about restaurant style eating?

1. When you eat at any restaurant, expect to be having a high calorie and kilojoule intake just from your main course. Imagine how much higher it would be if you added entrée, dessert or cheese platter, and wine to the tally!

2. Don’t be fooled into thinking a better sounding menu name is necessarily healthier for you. For example, you might think a tomato based pasta sauce off the Italian menu is lighter for your body because of the way you cook it at home.

In all reality, it (the pasta and sauce) is likely to be laden with a lot of extra oil or butter – far more than you would ever have dreamt of.

3. If you have high blood pressure, then a restaurant meal could raise your pressure to an unhealthy level if you are sensitive to salt (and about 1 in 3 people with high blood pressure are salt sensitive).

4. If you always feel swollen and fluidy the next day, then maybe your body is retaining the excess salt along with extra water.

5. If you eat out often for work commitments or pure convenience, then you’re not going for the gourmet experience! Ask for your meal to be made with a minimum of ingredients; simplicity without added fats, oils, cream is what you are chasing if your waistline is bulging too much. Ask for a simply cooked lean meat (chicken, fish or seafood) with a naked salad with dressing on the side (so you can control how much is added) or steamed vegetables (and remind them not to ruin it with butter, cream and sauces).

The chef may not be happy to serve such a plain meal, but you are the customer and in the end, you should be the one who is happy.

6. If eating out is for a very special occasion or it is something of a rare event (maybe once or twice a month), then enjoy your meal without any hesitation.

One meal out is not going to ruin your health. Choose what you want from the mains and entrée menu.

A word of advice though – feeling over-stuffed like a Christmas turkey is not pleasant and can be totally ruin an other wise wonderful meal and evening. So scan the plates of other diners in the restaurant to see how big the serves are before you order.

7. Wait at least 20 minutes after your main course before you even think about ordering a dessert or cheese platter. Don’t feel rushed to order. By leaving at least 20 minutes, your brain gets a chance to catch up with how your stomach is feeling. If your stomach as had enough, then dessert might not even appeal any more or your stomach may send a message to say ‘share, don’t eat a full dessert or you’ll regret it!’

8. Don’t expect a restaurant to whip up a special dietary meal without an early warning or request from you – that’s simply not fair.

Ring the venue ahead of time to ask whether they are able to cater for you and discuss what you might need. Chefs will do their best to interpret and serve a meal to suit your needs, but they may need quite specific instruction about what you can and can’t eat. A chef may have an interest in nutrition but that doesn’t mean the chef understands your specific dietary needs unless he/she is also qualified as a dietitian.

And remember you have to trust that the wait staff can accurately tell the chef about your special needs. I think it’s safe to assume that those wait staff probably have zero understanding of your special diets and the message will not be told correctly.

9. Being organised is one of the keys to creating great meals. Do you notice that all ingredients are pre- measured and usually sitting in small bowls ready to add in sequence, when chefs cook? The tortuous and slowest way to cook happens when you choose to stop and hunt for each ingredient as you make your way through the recipe, only to find when you’re partway through that a vital ingredient is missing!

10. When you want to repeat fancy restaurant meals at home, then you will need to learn how to adapt them and change them to suit your body’s state of health or weight, especially if you want to eat them every week.

Your dietitian will be able to help you adapt recipes to suit your needs, but that doesn’t mean the dietitian is a chef.

Some fantastic news from New Zealand is that the 2011 MasterChef winner is Nadia Lim, a Registered Dietitian.

For your interest, not only am I a dietitian and nutritionist, but I also studied at the Coorparoo School of Food to gain further formal practical training in cookery, butchery, catering and store keeping. I am neither a chef nor a qualified cook though.

11. Research has proven that the more often you eat out, the more likely you are to be overweight. My analyses and results confirm that it’s not just fast food that is a problem – what you eat at a restaurant, café and friend’s house matters as well for your body and health.

Which TV cooking shows have changed the way you cook at home or influenced your health? I’d be interested to hear about your experiences and thoughts.

Please add to the article and discussion. Leave your comments by adding them in the link box just below.

What to use instead of pastry. Ingredient swaps for a healthier body and weight.

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equal calorie content in very unequal serve sizes

 

Frittata or quiche: which of these serves would fill you better?

The smaller slice of quiche or the bigger slice of crustless egg pie (frittata)?

In the serve sizes shown, each has the same energy content.

 

Shop-bought pastry dough and pie crusts make it super easy to whip up a warm pie for dinner or dessert.

And unless you’ve made your own pastry, you probably will not realise how heavy and damaging most pastries are for your body.

Did you know that puff pastry, shortbread pastry, pie pastry, pastry cases are all about one quarter (1/4) pure fat once cooked? And that the most common fat used to make commercial pastries is saturated – a shocker for your heart, blood vessels and cholesterol?

The only pastry without fat is filo (fillo, phyllo) pastry sheets, but the trap with filo is that you brush butter between every sheet before you bake it, so although it starts out pretty healthy, it fast becomes a fat trap!

So what can you use instead of pastry and pie crusts?

There are many easy swaps that you can use to replace pastry in your favourite recipes. Choose from:

  • Scone dough. You can only use scone dough on top of your pies, but it looks fantastic at the table – all puffed and high. To make cutting the pie easy, divide the scone topping into individual squares or circles and sit them a little apart when you place them on top of the filling before baking. The individual shapes will rise and swell to kiss each other, but they’ll keep their own shape. Scone dough is super easy to make and works well for both sweet and savoury pies.
  • Cooked grain on the base – cous cous, rice, barley, millet. Egg white, whole eggs or a dash of oil helps to create the bottom crust.
  •  Sliced rings of cooked potato or sweet potato. Sliced cooked vegetable makes a great base for a crustless quiche. You’ll need to use a solid baking pan to avoid leaking because you haven’t got pastry to create a seal. Do not use a push-out pie pan with a removable bottom – you’ll end up with a mess in the oven! Simply lightly spray the base and sides of baking pan with oil and lay down a single layer of cooked potato or sweet potato rings. Then pour your quiche filling on top and bake as usual. Leftover baked orange sweet potato rings look and taste great when you slice a pastry-less quiche or frittata.
  • Bread slices. These are best pre-baked to make them crisp. Once crisp and cooled, you can store them in an airtight container to fill at a later date.
  • Flat pita pocket bread, lavash, or thin wrap breads. You can use the paper thin wrap bread sheets or lavash bread to make bases. To make a base for a pie, tart or quiche, lightly spray your baking dish with oil. Lay down single sheets of wrap bread, slightly overlapping if necessary so that base and sides are covered. If you need to overlap the sheets, then lightly brush some water between the overlapping layers and press gently together. Neatly trim or scissor the edges after you’ve added your filling ready to bake.
  • Tortilla or Mexican wraps. Push these gently down to fit inside lightly greased big muffin pans (or pans lined with non-stick baking paper). The sides will fold, but don’t be tempted to press them down too hard or you will tear the wraps and cause a hole that your filling might leak through. Pre- bake them for a crisper crust or fill and bake.
  •  Crepes. Instead of baking a traditional sweet or savoury pie, use commercial frozen crepe circles to make an equally delicious meal or desert. Simply cook up your favourite filling, place a few spoonfuls inside a warmed crepe and roll up.
  • Pizza dough or bread dough. You can sometimes use bread and pizza dough as a swap in place of pastry in some recipes. It is not as versatile and bread dough takes a bit more time to prepare, so if you are busy then you’ll probably choose one of the other pastry swaps instead.​

Okay, you’ve got this far and decided that none of those swaps will work for you in place of pastry. So how can you improve the recipe and still aim for a healthier body?

  • Consider a swap to fillo (filo) pastry sheets. Layer them up using a light spray of oil between each sheet rather than brushing with butter.
  • If filo doesn’t suit, use pastry on one side of your pie only – on top or on the bottom, but not under and over! You cut the fat and calories (kilojoules) in half straight away. Or slash/cut a smaller pastry sheet and stretch it out over the top of the pie. You’ll create a pretty lattice pastry top with far less pastry.
  • Cut pastry shapes smaller than the top of your pie and cook them separately from the filling. ‘Garnish’ the pie with a little taste of pastry at serving time rather than totally covering it to bake.
  • And if you insist on using pastry, aim at least once to make your own pastry by hand (no machine) from the very beginning using the base ingredients – flour, fat (butter/margarine/oil), salt/sugar, water/egg. By making your own, you not only put some physical effort into it but you will also soon see why pastry is not a healthy choice. There is so much fat added which bumps the calorie and kJ count right up.

How do these easy swaps compare with traditional pastry on the nutrition scale?

EasyDietSwaps doesn’t want you to be counting calories or fat, so the table below is here just to show you that the suggestions will really make a difference.

Remember big numbers are not good numbers. You want the lowest calorie or kilojoule number if weight loss is your goal.

Pastry or easy swap per 100 g cooked Calories Kilojoules Fat (grams)
Oven baked sweet potato slices 84 350 0
Cooked potato slices 88 370 0
Rice crust (includes egg white) 140 590 1
Cous cous crust (includes egg white) 145 610 0.3
Crepe 170 720 6
Scone dough 260 1100 7
Flat breads (includes spray of oil) 303 1270 7
Choux pastry 375 1570 12
Fillo pastry (no butter between sheets) 380 1600 3
Puff pastry 440 1840 27
Vol au vent cases 450 1880 26
Shortcrust pastry 506 2120 28
Pie crust 506 2120 28

Now you can see why it is better to either skip pastry or swap to one of the other ideas instead.

What ideas have you tried to replace or reduce pastry?
Leave your idea or comment to share with others to help them get healthier.

4 reasons why exercise alone is a bad weight loss plan: exercise will never be an easy diet swap

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If you believed the reality TV shows that put the weight loss journey of seriously overweight people on public display, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the major (and possibly only) way to succeed with losing weight would be to do some heavy-duty fitness training.

But that is far from the truth. Exercise alone never has been and never will be an easy route to weight loss.

You may have suspected that already. How many times have you or your friends complained about the lack of weight loss even when working out really hard?

I attended a webinar this month and the speaker, Associate Professor Nuala Byrne*, presented some sobering facts that I have ‘translated’ into practical terms today.

What are the facts?

1. You have to physically work very hard to lose weight through exercise.

To lose almost 1 kg (2.2 lb) each month, you’d need to power up and briskly walk at least 31 km (19 miles) more, each and every week.

If you’ve got a GPS or an app on your phone for speed and distance, then you need to walk at 6 km per hour (3.7 miles per hour) when covering the 31 km.

If you can’t keep up the pace, then walk further – close to 34 km (21 miles) at 5.5 km per hour (about 3.5 miles per hour).

If you have a pedometer, then aim to cover an extra 7,000 to 10,000 steps within an hour – that’s in addition to the steps you’ve counted up at the end of your working day!

Do this brisk walk every day. After 28 days, you’ll have lost almost 1 kg (2.2 lb) if you’re lucky.

This rate of walking is termed ‘moderate physical activity’. You can tell it is not fidgeting. It’s not the shopping centre walk, and it’s not the pace of walking you do around the office.

Now, if you’re carrying an extra 20 kg (40 lb) or more on your body and you are not fit, this is a very difficult target. I suggest that speak with your doctor and exercise expert before lacing up your boots and heading out the door because you could injure yourself, shoot your heart rate and blood pressure to dangerously high levels or have other problems.

2. You need a lot of spare time in your week to cover the distance – an extra 5 to 6 hours each week. There is no shortcut to get results.

I’ve done some rough maths for you and it adds up to a lot of time:

Each month, plan to walk 4 x 31 km = 124 km (76 miles). And invest almost 23 hrs each month.

In a year, you’ll have walked 1612 km (close to 1000 miles). And spent 290 hrs each year walking fast. For how much weight loss? After a year, about 10 kg (42 lb), assuming you don’t eat or drink more fuel to compensate for all the great effort you’re putting in, and you really do keep up the speed and do the distance everyday, weekends included.

It is the rare person who can commit to this and actually do it. When you’re time poor, it’s hard to find that extra time and the more typical results for weight loss through walking sink down to just a couple of kg per year because other things get in the way of most people to actually ‘do it’.

“We’re all born eaters, but few of us are born athletes. So unless you really like and enjoy your chosen activity, then you’re not likely to stick with it”.

3. An hour on the treadmill burns about 1200 kilojoules (280 cals), but you can eat or drink that number of kilojoules in a much, much faster time!

After a great workout at the gym, it’s easy to be tempted with a ‘treat’ or cuppachino, but in a matter of minutes with a few mouthfuls of food you can easily undo all the effort you’ve put in at the gym.

There are more calories and kilojoules in a small cinnamon donut. Anyone could gobble that down in a few minutes. And if you’re thinking a 50 g (2 oz) pack of nuts would have been better, think again. This healthier option holds at least 1200 kJ and is easily eaten within five to ten minutes. Yet to burn that same amount of fuel (energy), a person would need to walk about 60 minutes – an entire hour.

“It’s easier and more efficient to find 20 minutes to prepare a proper meal than to find 60 minutes to go for a fast walk. You will always eat, but you won’t always find time to walk.”

3. Exercise doesn’t always suppress your appetite. For some people, exercise drives them to eat more and it’s got nothing to do with calorie trading or self-reward.

Watch how your body reacts to exercise. If you’re always hungry after your exercise, then experiment with when you do it.

Start by timing the exercise to end just before a ‘normal’ meal zone and have that meal organised and ready to eat straight after working out. If you impulse eat after exercise then the chances are high that you will over-compensate and consume more kJ (cals) than you burnt off.

You might now be thinking that being a lounge lizard looks good after all and that you can throw out your training shoes. But that’s also far from the truth.

The research confirms that people who lead an active life are the ones who don’t regain their lost weight. Byrne suggested that you aim for 60 – 90 minutes of moderate intensity exercise each day to prevent weight regain.

So although exercise does not directly make you lose weight, exercise does help to prevent weight regain – exercise will help you keep weight off once you’ve lost it.

The secret is choosing activities that you enjoy and to mix them around so you’ve get variety. Try a few activities and find some that you enjoy. Stick with them and keep experimenting with new activities to add even more physical stuff to your life.

The way I see it is that regular activity:

  • distracts you and keeps you away from food, if only temporarily. If you’re out there ‘doing it’ for an hour or two, then you’re not in there eating
  • may motivate you and improve your desire to eat well, so that you stick with your healthier food and drink choices
  • helps with blood sugar (glucose) control but if your blood glucose levels are riding too high, then your doctor or exercise physiologist may warn you not to walk. If you have diabetes and your levels are too low, you might need to top up with some carbohydrate before training
  • helps with blood pressure levels but if your blood pressure is too high or unstable then your trainer may put a halt to the walk
  • improves muscle tone and a naturally toned and muscled body looks good and improves your body shape
  • lifts low moods and builds self-confidence. Getting out and getting physical, even if you don’t really want to, can improve your mood. When your mood is better, you’ll probably make better food choices. If you tackle something that pushes you or takes you out of your comfort zone and you succeed, then that’s a huge confidence builder!

In my opinion, although an active life is a good life, it is far, far easier and more time efficient to change your eating plan with some easy diet swaps to lose weight than it is to burn the weight off with exercise. What you consume through your mouth counts for far more than exercise ever will.

I’d love to hear whether you have found it easier to get your body healthier by changing your food and drink or exercise or both.

What role has exercise had in your life? How has it helped you to keep your body in shape? Or does what you eat and drink make a bigger difference?

Your thoughts are important, so please add to the article and discussion by leaving your comments by clicking on the ‘thought bubble’ beside the title of this article or by clicking ‘leave a reply’ at the end.
* Associate Professor Nuala Byrne is the immediate past President of the Australia and New Zealand Obesity Society (ANZOS) and Co-Director of the Energy Metabolism Group in the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology (2011).

How to get the sour cream taste without sacrificing flavour: 3 easy diet swaps

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Sour cream, tasty as it is, is a shocker for your heart, blood vessels and body weight. Even the light versions of sour cream are stashed full of excess fat, kilojoules and calories.

If you enjoy the taste of sour cream, but want a much healthier substitute that doesn’t sacrifice flavour, then I’ve got some easy swaps for you.

In place of sour cream, swap to:

  1. Buttermilk. At first glance, with a name like that, you’d think this would be full of butterfat but buttermilk is actually really quite low in fat. Buttermilk is only 2% fat (close to reduced fat milk), but sour cream is more than 35% fat. Buttermilk is beautiful in soups and scones.
  2. Natural unflavoured yoghurt. For fantastic topper on potatoes and other vegetables, swap to natural yoghurt in place of sour cream. Natural yoghurt works well in soups, curries, and sauces – be sure to only add it towards the end of heating. Even the full-fat yoghurt slashes the total fat, saturated fat and calories (kilojoules) enormously.
  3. Greek-style plain yoghurt. Experiment with different varieties of Greek-style yoghurts and natural yoghurts – some are smooth and creamy, others are firmly set. You’ll find the one that suits your taste buds when you try different brands. Replace sour cream and cream cheese in dips with plain yoghurt.

This is such an easy swap to make today. Stop buying sour cream and start buying natural or plain yoghurt, Greek-style yoghurt or buttermilk.

Converting the family?

Often they will never now, but sometimes you may need to disguise or hide things to prevent an automatic ‘I don’t like it’ and ’I’m not going to try it’ reaction.

Be creative. For example, serve the yoghurt in a bowl and let them assume it is sour cream. Don’t tell them that it is not sour cream. Throw away the evidence (the yoghurt carton) before the family looks in the fridge. Put the yoghurt into the empty sour cream jar/pack and see if they notice.

Want more detail on how these swaps compare with sour cream?

For those of you with a head for numbers, check out the table to see how they compare. Remember, for better health and body weight, choose something with less saturated fat and fewer calories or kilojoules.

Item (per cup) Calories Kilojoules Total fat (saturated fat) grams
Sour cream 915 3835 98 (62)
Lite sour cream 550 2315 52 (33)
Extra light sour cream 415 1735 32 (30)
Greek-style yoghurt 340 1430 16 (10)
Plain or natural yoghurt 215 915 11 (7)
Buttermilk 150 630 5 (3)
Low fat natural yoghurt 150 625 1 (0)

And just in case you were thinking that there is a spelling error in this article, I want to explain something to you. In Australia, yoghurt is spelt with an extra ‘h’. In the USA, it is spelt without the ‘h’ as in yogurt. In the UK, it can be spelt either way. In other parts of the world, it is spelt yogourt!

Try these easy diet swaps and tell me what you think.

Please add your ideas, thoughts or suggestions today.

Quick in the kitchen: cooking fish in the pan without fat

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Want an easy way to not only cut the fat back when you cook fish, but also to cut down time for washing up?

The lingering smell of fish in the frypan and kitchen sink is something that used to put me off cooking fish. But I discovered a really simple trick for cooking fish in the frypan that makes cooking fish a dream, and I am going to share it with you today.

 

  1. Cut a sheet of non-stick baking paper into a circle so that it fits up the sides of your frypan.
  2. Bring your pan up to cooking temperature (medium is usually good for fish).
  3. Place the non-stick baking paper into the pan and lay your fish fillets on top of the paper. If the fish has skin, put the skin side down first.

A rough rule of thumb for cooking a thick fillet of fish is to cook for 4 to 5 minutes, over medium heat, and then gently turn your fish over and continue to cook for another 3 to 4 minutes, or until the fish flakes easily when tested with a fork.

Once the fish is cooked, throw the baking paper in the rubbish! The pan is almost as clean as when you started. The fishy smell gets thrown out straight away with the garbage.

If you’re cooking fish on a public barbecue and you’re worried about how clean the barbie is, then lay a sheet of non-stick baking paper over the grill plate and cook the fish as usual. Just be careful of naked flames – you don’t want the paper to catch fire!

My clients love this tip. I hope you do too.

What other ways do you cook fish without fat or oil? Or tell me how you went with this new kitchen trick by leaving a comment.

Halloween – the good, the bad and the ugly: how to make Halloween healthier for you and the kids

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When you think about it, many things that go with Halloween rub against parents’ best efforts to keep their children safe and healthy.

On Halloween, parents let the kids:

  • knock on strangers’ doors
  • accept candy, treats and lollies from strangers
  • accept unwrapped food from unknown people
  • walk in the evening light, perhaps unsupervised by adults be frightened by ‘monsters’, cobwebs and other scary items
  • eat truckloads of sugary sweets before bed

But like it or not, the celebration of Halloween is well established in USA and gaining momentum in Australia in a big, big way.

So how do you prevent or avoid the aftermath of sugar overload?

As a treater, you could be left with a pantry full of temptation if you stock up with too many sweet treats for the number of little monsters that knock on your door for ‘trick or treat’.

To avoid a pantry full of problem food, think of the entire street and neighbourhood as the lolly-store on Halloween. Therefore you don’t need to have an endless choice of different sweets in the basket of treats. Be sensible and only buy one bag or pre-wrapped lollies or candies to give out.

But Halloween food treats don’t have to be candies and lollies.

Some easy, healthier alternatives include:

  • bagged coloured or plain popcorn seasonal fruits
  • mini-packs of dried fruit
  • pretzel shapes
  • fruit juice boxes
  • small tubs of preserved fruit frozen fruit juice sticks

Never feel awkward or bad about fresh or dried fruit treats because for some children, fruit is a treat that they rarely get at home.

Some children are on special diets due to diabetes or allergies and food intolerances, so consider what treats to have for these kids on Halloween.

Best of all, start thinking beyond food treats on Halloween for all kids and let the neighbours add sweet candies to the treat bags.

What can you have in the treat basket instead of food on Halloween?

A few good inexpensive non-food treats for Halloween include:

  • balloon
  • leftover international coins from your travels hand-made origami shape
  • paper plane (pattern or folded)
  • mini-pack of seeds
  • packets of used postage stamps for collectors pencil
  • crayon
  • sticker
  • pen
  • garden flowers

What to do when the kids arrive home with bags stuffed full of lollies?

You’ve got two clear choices.

Let them eat the lot at once and with a bit of luck the may feel unwell with a tummy ache afterwards, which might out them off sweets for some time. Or ask them to have a small amount and put the rest of the bag aside for another day.

My thoughts? Let them choose.

If they want to put the bag aside, then put most of the contents into a container that’s not see-through because “what you don’t see doesn’t tempt you so easily” applies to both you and the kids. Leaving the bag in plain sight or in a clear-view bottle or jar is a guaranteed way to trick and trip both you and the kids into eating more often.

By the way, if visiting little monsters didn’t thin out if your stockpile of candies and sweets are your downfall, then dispose of the pile in the bin rather than have the lollies luring you into a feast that you will regret.

What are your thoughts on Halloween? Is this a celebration that you worry about? How do you manage the sugar overload for both you and the little monsters? What would you suggest in place of candies and lollies for the visiting kids?

Add your thoughts here.