I remember feeling quite overwhelmed one morning when listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, by the news that President Obama’s healthcare reforms looked like they would be passed. If you’re reading this in the US you might not be aware of how supportive many of us around the world – in countries that have some government healthcare available – are of the move to make individual healthcare for the 35 million Americans currently without any cover a reality.
The boost to the economy by getting sick workers back and active will be a blessing, and though it’s essential to reduce the total number of citizens that need government health insurance in the long term, one way to do it is to ensure that the population is as healthy as possible.
Good food and nutrition are essential to achieving this, and this is where baking usually comes under fire. I’m talking cookies, cakes, bread: the whole delicious gamut. There is the undeniable truth that if you consume a diet that’s very heavy in carbohydrates (flour and sugar primarily) and fats (butter and oil) you’ll find it nearly impossible to keep your weight down and the belly fat off unless you can burn off all the calories like a Olympic champion.
Well, for me that kind of exercise is out of the question, and that’s down to intention rather than time. If it was really important to me I would make the time, but I usually give preference to almost anything else in my life. So my only option is to modify what I eat, the way I eat it and also the way I bake. This is what I do.
1. View baked foods as a treat
This is number one I believe. Keep the quantity of fresh vegetables in your diet as high as you can, and make sure the size of the portions you eat is relative to the energy your body uses during the day. Baked goods are high in calories, meaning high in fuel for the body, and if you eat more than your body can burn then it will be stored as fat. My body can’t use 10 slices of bread a day, no matter how much my head wants it. So I slice it thinner, make the piece of cake a little smaller, and limit the biscuits to every other day and keep it special.
2. Add some wholemeal flour to every recipe
This has two benefits, and not necessary the ones you’d expect. The first is to slightly reduce the calorific value of the total weight of flour used and help to extend the time taken by the body to burn that fuel. Complex carbohydrates like wholemeal flour will sustain your blood sugar levels for longer and stop the munchies kicking in to early. The other benefit is that the added fibre will help promote good gut and colon health. Now, when it comes to whether wholemeal flour is “healthier” than white, the jury is out. Most of the nutrients are trapped within the fibre and aren’t subsequently extracted by our body during digestion. So, although potentially important micro-nutrients are present in wholemeal flour, eating the stuff won’t access them.
3. Tweak the recipe to reduce the fat
Cutting the butter in the recipe with a little sunflower oil (3/4 butter to 1/4 oil), adding ingredients other than fat to help keep it moist (a little grated apple, pear or carrot, or a puree of dried fruit), increase the flavours to mask a reduction in fat (grated orange or lemon zest, spices, vanilla or fresh ginger); any of the these tips or a few together will help a recipe where you’ve dropped the fat content. As a general guide, most baking recipes will, on appearance alone, hold up with the fat reduced by a fifth to a quarter so long as a little liquid is added to compensate. However, it will show in the flavour and texture so be both accepting of this, and creative in ramping up the other aspects of the bakes good. Make the topping crisper, the filling more generous, the flavour bolder, and this should help.
4. Cut the sugar
My recipes are quite generous with sweetness as I have a sweet tooth, and I’ve been told on the form that you can reduce the sugar in my recipes by half easily (which I don’t believe). But with all recipes you should, like with fat, be able to reduce the sugar by a fifth to a quarter without affecting the appearance too much. Sugar has the added benefit of turning baked goods chewy, but other ingredients can help here. Grind rolled oats to a powder and add 2 tbsp (about 20g) per 500g mixture together with an equal amount of water, and this will help give the texture a neat chewy roundness. For added sweetness, some flavours and ingredients taste sweeter than others. Honey, dates, orange zest, vanilla, for example, all have flavours that taste ‘sweet’ rather than savoury and so by adding these ingredients you food the brain into thinking something is sweeter than it actually is.
5. Don’t eat the whole cake!
Share it, freeze it, whatever you need to do so that the cake isn’t tempting you every hour of the day and night. I can confess to getting up in the night to have a slice of cake, and nibbling away at a tray of cookies until they vanish. I give away what I can, but I often freeze it cut into portions. That way I can just take out what I want and then have to wait until it defrosts. That cools some of the urgency in my hunger and means that I’m less likely to go back for that 2nd or 3rd piece.
