Being an Indian I know the importance of cooking food at home. Cooking our meals have been an integral part of our heritage. But with the growing culture of working away from home or working for long hours, cooking our food has lost its importance. In America, this problem is even worse. Cooking food at home has become an endangered art there.

People living away from home, sharing flats and having long working hours are literally living on food trucks and apps delivering food. Growing technology has made everything very convenient. Feeling hungry? Just open your phone, click a few icons and your food is on the way!! What’s even better it’s free after 30 minutes.

But as the convenience is increasing so is the risk of obesity. Globally, over two billion children and adults suffer from health problems related to being obese, and an increasing percentage of people die from these health conditions. America tops the list with 79.4 million obese people and China comes second. India, on the other hand, has the second highest number of obese children out of 184 countries.

Being obese opens up your body to a huge number of other diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, etc. So, it’s high time that we start moving backward. Eating home cooked food is no longer uncool but is the key to a good and healthy diet. (1) (2)

Benefits Of Cooking At Home

80/20 Weight Loss Rule

Have you been working out hard to look lean? Is it still not working out? Diet may be the missing ingredient then. The 80/20 rule says that to get a healthy body 80% role is played by diet and 20% by exercise. Most of us think it the other way round we work out hard in the gym and hardly give our diet that much importance, leading to nothing but disappointment when we don’t get the results.

A healthy home cooked diet can end your daily struggle with your weight. (3) (4)

Now, don’t come up with the excuse “I just ate at the subway or I had a breakfast cereal, they are healthy!!!”

No, they are not. They are just convenient.

Saves Money

Eating homemade food saves a lot of money. When you eat out you are not just paying for the food you are paying to keep that business running. You are paying for their electricity bills, for their water bills, and for their profits.  This applies to even the frozen and ready to eat meals. (5)

Saves Time

Most common excuse among people for not cooking at home is they don’t have time. But with proper planning and execution, you can reduce the cooking time and enjoy healthy home cooked food.

First of all, no one is asking you to become a gourmet chef and put up some extraordinary dish. Just grab a few ingredients and put up a simple quick recipe which takes you less than 30 minutes. This way you don’t have to wait for your food to be delivered and can come up with something healthy quickly.

Secondly, who told you to cook your food just before you eat it. If you have time in the morning cook 1 or 2 things then and you can eat it during the day or if you have early morning work hours you can cook something at night and refrigerate it.

A little time and effort is nothing compared to the kind of benefits this simple habit will reap.

Also Read: The scam behind zero-calorie and low-calorie products.

Healthy Ingredients

When you order from a restaurant you are unaware of what you are eating? What is the quality of the ingredients used? What kind of oils were used? Were the vegetables used fresh? By cooking at home you can control all these factors and may end up making the same dish at home with fewer ingredients and at a cheaper price.

I love french fries, McDonald’s fries have some 18 to 20 ingredients and that stuff is frozen. Think about it do you really need 20 ingredients to make fries at home. Hardly 5-6 ingredients are enough to get that same taste and how cheap and healthy would it be then?

Portion Control

When you go to a restaurant you can’t control the portion sizes they serve. You may end up eating much more than you actually wanted to after all you paid for that food then why waste it? Eating at home makes you eat a limited quantity of food.

Reduces Childhood Obesity

In a study on household routines and obesity in U.S. preschool-aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don’t watch TV on weekdays.

It Helps You Maintain A Normal Weight And BMI

According to a study published in 2017 people consuming home cooked food had a 28% less chance of having overweight BMI and 25% less likely to have excess body fat percentage. Eating home cooked food also increased the daily consumption of fruits and vegetable and improved diet quality. It also improved the cardio-metabolic status.

Reduces Carbon Footprints

Cooking helps you shift towards more plant-based products and less packaged foods. Therefore unknowingly you are helping farmers and improving your health. Less packaged food also means less packaging waste which is mostly plastic and reduces environmental damage.

Balanced Meal

A Seattle study on 437 residents of King County asked them to fill a questionnaire about their eating habits. It was observed that people who ate at home 3 times a week had a score of 67 on Healthy Eating Index out of 100 while those who ate 6 times per week at home had a score of 74. Healthy Eating Index score indicates whether the combination of fruits, vegetable and other elements in a person’s diet is right or not. A higher score means a better combination of all the elements.

Longer Life

A Taiwanese and Australian study which observed the eating habits of 1,888 men and women found that eating home cooked food increased the chances of being alive in 10 years by 47%. It was not just because you ate home cooked food but the entire activity of planning, shopping, cooking, the physical effort, and the mental activity was responsible for the increase in longevity. The study also found that lower-income people who cooked lived longer than rich people who did not cook.

Reduces Excess Calorie, Fat, Sugar, and Saturated Fat Consumption

Eating out can increase your daily sodium, fat and calorie intake by 50% !!! According to research conducted at Harvard University, families that ate together most days had a higher intake of health-promoting nutrients such as calcium, fiber, iron, vitamin B-6, vitamin B12, vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin C; they also had a less overall saturated fat intake.

Improves Mental health

Eating at home with family or other people has several mental health benefits. Social meals can make us feel happier even outside of meal times. That’s because social connections strengthened over meals can help us create a sense of belonging and even reduce symptoms of depression.

Also Read: Which are the top 10 quick pocket-friendly healthy snacks?

How To Make Cooking Easy then?

1. Plan Your Meals at least a week before. This way you won’t waste time thinking about what to cook and you can complete your grocery shopping beforehand on weekends.

2. Cook Today and eat the same food tomorrow. If you don’t have the time to cook you can cook extra and refrigerate. Don’t use the same food the entire week.

3. You can prepare for weekdays on weekends. I chop vegetables on weekends and use them on weekdays to prepare whatever I want to eat.

4. Make it a group activity. Cooking alone can get boring and tiring so involve your family and friends too!!

5. Invest in a slow cooker. If you have a time crunch a slow cooker lets you cook multiple dishes and you just need to put the ingredients and leave it. You will get your food ready by evening when you come home.

I have given you enough reasons to start cooking at home. One last thing that I would especially like to mention is even when cooking at home stop using Teflon pans or woks. In India, we have traditionally cooked and stored food in copper and iron utensils and there is a reason behind it. Cooking in iron vessels naturally supplements iron in foods. In a 2013 study published in the Indian Journal of Pediatrics researchers report that when preschool children were given foods cooked in iron pots for three months, there was a 7.9%  increase in their haemoglobin levels.

Another 1986 study published in the Journal of The American Dietetic Association states that foods cooked in iron utensils are significantly higher in iron content than those cooked in non-iron ones.

Copper utensils are also used to store drinking water because it has anti-bacterial properties. A 2011 study by the US Environmental Protection Agency, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, says that 355 copper alloys, including many brasses, kill more than 99.9% of bacteria within two hours of contact. Chefs across the world, therefore, use copper vessels for making dishes where temperature control is important. (6)

It does not matter from which country or culture you just revisit your roots and ask your grandparents how they cooked because long before researchers our ancestors had the key to healthy eating.

Feel free to browse through the health section to get more tips on healthy living and eating.

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