Americans dont like to cook. They dont want to spend the time it takes for food shopping, food preparation and clean up, especially when its so much easier to stop for a quick bite at a restaurant or drive-thru or bring home some take-out. Yet, experts are convinced that making home cooking fashionable again would be one of the most effective steps we could take to address the nations obesity crisis.
The United States ranks at the bottom of industrialized countries not only in terms of time spent on meal preparation but also on consumption, according to surveys conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international group that analyzes economic data worldwide. In other words, we not only dont cook, we also dont set much time aside to enjoy our food. Instead, more and more of us skip breakfast, work through lunch and sustain ourselves throughout the day by snacking.
The percentage of calories from snacks in the American diet has doubled since the 1970s, as more people have turned into all-day grazers while foregoing sitdown meals on most days, a study by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) found.
Over half of American adults say they have three or more snacks a day. Almost a third of children and adolescents eat chips, popcorn, pretzels and the likes on a daily basis. The amount of pizza eaten, both in restaurants and at home, has nearly tripled over the past thirty years. Meanwhile, the number of calories in pizzas has increased by 25 percent on average since the late 1970s. Over the same time period vegetable consumption has declined from 2.6 to just 1.9 servings per day and that includes French fries.
The easiest way to turn these developments around would be to start preparing our meals from scratch again, says Mark Bittman, food writer and author of Cooking Solves Everything: How Time in the Kitchen Can Save Your Health, Your Budget, and Even the Planet (Kindle edition, 2011). Millions of Americans dont ever cook. The rest cooks on occasion, often just microwaving. Many dont bother with sitting down at the dinner table but rather eat in the car, at a counter, or in front of a screen. And thats a shame, because cooking is a basic essential, worthwhile and even enjoyable task, he writes.
Bittman applauds others who are trying to get the message out about the many benefits of home cooking, like his fellow-book-author Michael Pollan who just published a new book on the same subject, titled, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin Press, 2013). In a review on the then upcoming publication he writes: Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet.
The reasons are obvious. If you are in charge of the ingredients that go into your food, you already are going to eat better because you wont include extra fat, salt, sugar, preservatives, dyes and other additives. You also wont eat as many highly caloric items like French fries, which are cumbersome to make at home. The same goes for pizza (made from scratch, not the ones you just heat up).
One of the central problems with cooking is that we dont value it enough any more. We are used to having tasks like these done for us by outside service providers. A fat burning overview can help you construct a clear summarize of what you need to focus on to complete your fat reducing purpose if you're a novice; or serve as a reminder for those who are at an advanced or more advance phase of their losing weight plan. Applying are seven steps that can serve as methods for your own weight loss system. The first thing that one must understand is that losing weight and losing fat is not exactly the same thing. Many weight loss programs have misled people into thinking that it is the same, but most diets and weight loss applications only work by leading to a person's body to burn more muscle cells and water than actual body fat, more help please visit The Fat Loss Factor. But unlike getting your car or computer fixed by someone else, cooking is much more intimate. It connects us with our bodies, nature and loved ones.
Michael Pollan even thinks that the experience of cooking brings us closer to the most basic elements that surround us: fire, water, air and earth and also tightens our social and ecological relationships. All that has deeply transformational characteristics that can change us on multiple levels, but all for the better.
That is much to hope for perhaps too much. Still, it is a fact that an increasing number of people are looking for ways to eat more healthily and also reduce stress on the environment, e.g. by cutting back on meat consumption and buying more produce from local farms. A rediscovery of home cooking would fit squarely within these trends. Whether it will be enough to transform or currently predominant way of life remains doubtful.
If you liked this article, you may also enjoy reading "Home Cooking for Healthy Eating" and "Tips for Leaner Cooking Techniques"
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Timi Gustafson R.D. is a registered dietitian, newspaper columnist, blogger and author of the book The Healthy Diner How to Eat Right and Still Have Fun, which is available on her blog and at amazon.com. For more articles on nutrition, health and lifestyle, visit her blog, Food and Health with Timi Gustafson R.D. (www.timigustafson.com).
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