With just a few simple cooking techniques at home, you and your family can enjoy better health. Here are some tips that we’ve gathered on how to cook more healthily at home:

Reduce the amount of salt you use in your cooking. Most of the time we get used to a certain quantity of salt but, in fact, if you cut the amount of salt in your diet by a half, you might not even notice the difference. Reducing your salt intake is essential in keeping your blood pressure and health within a healthy range, and prevents you from getting a whole host of kidney problems. If you find the taste change unacceptable, you can always substitute salt with any natural herbs to make up for the taste change, and even get the health benefits from some of these healthy herbs.

Try to avoid open flame grilling or frying your meats and choose poaching, roasting or steaming. Open frame grilling introduces many carcinogenic (cancer-causing) materials to your food, and frying tends to be too oily which can be bad for your heart and your circulation system.

Avoid cooking with high temperatures or long cooking times. This is especially true for vegetables, which have some quite sensitive nutrients and vitamins that get destroyed very easily in high heat. Instead of boiling your vegetables for a long period of time, why not try steaming them, quickly stir frying them or blanching them for about a minute before serving? Note that you should probably wash your vegetables thoroughly before cooking to ensure that the pesticides (if any) or soil is removed from them before eating.

If any recipes that you use call for cream, try substituting half of it with Greek style yoghurt instead. Yoghurts tend to have much less fat than cream and can taste just as good, if not better than a full cream dish.

Make just enough food to feed your family and don’t subscribe to the mantra that “more is better than not enough”. Psychological studies have shown that people tend to try to finish whatever is on their plate even though they have gone past their point of satiation, and if you leave more on the plate, you or your family members might be tempted to eat more than is absolutely necessary, leaving them feeling bloated and heavy.

We hope you enjoy these very simple tips and would like to urge anyone to contribute more suggestions on how to achieve healthier lives by using simple advice on healthier cooking methods and techniques.