Diet Modifications
Food Preparation & Nutrition: AQA GCSE, topic 2.3.5
Adjusting Recipes
To make sure the meals you eat are healthy and nutritionally balanced, you should consider the Eatwell Guide when making dishes and following recipes. You can swap ingredients and adjust your cooking techniques to make meals healthier. Here's an example:
Chocolate raspberry brownie recipe
- Here are the ingredients for making chocolate raspberry brownies (BBC good food recipe):
- 200g dark chocolate, broken into chunks.
- 100g milk chocolate, broken into chunks.
- 250g pack salted butter.
- 400g soft light brown sugar.
- 4 large eggs.
- 140g plain flour.
- 50g cocoa powder.
- 200g raspberry.
Adjustments
- You could swap white flour for wholemeal flour (more fibre) or almond flour (high in protein, good fats and fibre).
- There's lots of sugar in the brownies. You could use a natural sweetener, like stevia, in place of some of the sugar.
- Adding something flavoursome like hazelnuts will give extra nutrients (unsaturated fats, magnesium, calcium and vitamins B and E).
Recommended Diet Adjustments
Here are a few general tips on how to improve your diet:
Cutting down on sugar
- Lots of everyday condiments (e.g. sweet chilli sauce) are full of sugar. Cut down on these condiments.
- When baking, use less sugar than recipes recommend.
- Remember that nutritional labels may not explicitly refer to 'sugar' - look out for things like sucrose and corn sugar.
Cutting down on saturated fats
- Instead of frying or roasting foods, grill, steam or bake them.
- Drain away fat.
- Use vegetable oils and low-fat spreads where possible.
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Eating more fibre
- Potato skins are good. Don't peel the skin off of your potatoes.
- Eat lots of pulses, like chickpeas, and vegetables.
- Choose wholemeal options, such as wholemeal bread, brown rice and wholegrain cereal.
Cutting down on salt
- Instead of using salt for flavouring, opt for other seasonings.
- Make stocks and sauces from scratch instead of using shop bought ones (that often contain lots of salt).
- Eat less of foods that have added salts and preservatives (e.g. smoked salmon).
Test yourself on Diet Modifications
Which of the following is a natural sweetener that can be used in place of sugar in a brownie recipe to make the product healthier?
Swapping white flour for wholemeal flour in a brownie recipe will increase the content of what?
Which of the following would improve your diet?
Which of these cooking methods is healthier?
Which of these cooking methods is least healthy?