Low Calorie Cooking Basics
How to Reduce Calories in Cooking: Simple Substitutions & Techniques
The article covers all the basics of how to cook foods that are lower in calories and gives some information on the history of the low calorie movement.
For decades, low calorie cooking has been touted as one of the number one way to lose weight and to live a healthier lifestyle, but what exactly is it?
History
In the 1890s and early 1900s chemists Wilbur Atwater and Russell Chittenden began the research of measuring food as units of heat that could be produced by burning it. This is how the calories in food are determined; by how much heat can be made by burning the food. So, the calorie count in a particular food is the amount of energy (heat) that the food makes in our bodies.
The first time this information was used in relation to a healthy diet was in 1917 when a physician named Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published a revolutionary book entitled Diet and Health, with a Key to the Calories. In this book readers were introduced to the concept of thinking of calories as a unit of measurement and so began the world’s fascination with counting calories.
Methods
This movement is what gave rise to low calorie cooking. Low calorie cooking can be part of a healthier diet, can help accommodate special dietary needs, and can still allow for foods that you love. The simple definition of low calorie cooking is using lower calorie ingredients and particular cooking methods so that the finished product is lower in calories than the original recipe.
For example, a traditional chocolate cake is very high in calories, but if we replace the sugar with sugar substitute and the icing with low calorie whipped cream, we can lower the amount of calories in the cake dramatically.
Sugar substitutes are usually the most common way of making a recipe low calorie. No real studies had been done on the benefits of sugar substitutes until 1994 when The Sweeteners Directive of the European Union was adopted and sugar substitutes began to be regulated and studies were introduced on the major benefits they posed to a low calorie diet.
Sugar substitutes are usually genetically altered sugars, or artificial sugars made in the lab. There are also natural sugars that have been found to have less calories than traditional cane sugar. One such sweetener is organic agave nectar, which is a natural sweetener extracted from the blue agave plant, or piña
There are several other ways to reduce calories in food in addition to sugar substitutes.
To replace high calorie fats, sauces and creams to add flavor to foods, many substitutes can be used. For example, herbs and spices, which are, for the most part, calorie free can be added to dishes such as mashed potatoes, meats and fish.
Alternative Cooking
There are also ways of cooking foods that can lower their calorie count. Baking, broiling, brazing and boiling can produce a much lower calorie food when used instead of frying. This is because there is no need to add extra fats to make the meat tender. If fats have to be used, low calorie margarines and oils can be used to replace their higher calorie counterparts. There are many different kinds on the market that offer up to half of the calories as their original counterparts and still work well as a cooking fat.
Using a mix of these techniques can produce foods that are not only lower in calories, but also taste just as good as the original.
