Do you make use of your Choices in Healthy Fast Food

Fast food has deep associations with the way we live in this country. Look around you as you drive, and  quite often, you see people driving their cars with one hand and unwrapping a burger or something with the other. We're always tempted by all kinds of fast food offerings driving back home after work each day, and often, we succumb to temptation. For a country that drives for a large part of the day, what we need is food that is easy to eat as fast food is, and is healthy nonetheless. What we need is healthy fast food. How many fast food chains are there that are actually trying to move you towards health? This isn't an article that tries to bash fast food chains for being socially irresponsible. It's an article about who's actually stepping up and making a change. If you look in the right places, there are quite a few great restaurant chains offering wonderful healthy Mexican, Asian  or Mediterranean fast food - great soups, wholesome salads, delicious but healthy desserts and whole grain staples.

Let's look at a few of the best examples of being responsible with fast food - healthy nutrition, no unhealthy fats, low levels of salt, organic ingredients and nutritional information that's easy to read. And would you believe it, McDonald's happens to be among the healthiest fast food chains in the country - one of the top 10.

Take the healthy fast food chain, Panera Bread. This bakery-based fast food chain offers all kinds of whole wheat bread choices to make your sandwiches out of, the chips that go along with the sandwiches are baked ones, and you can choose fresh fruit to eat with your sandwiches. Noodles & Company doesn't take noodles and turn them into greasy mall food. To begin with, the grease they use is healthy soy oil. You can choose from among American noodles, Asian noodles or Mediterranean noodles; and once you do, can pick hormone- and antibiotic-free meat and organic tofu. Add to it a healthy helpings of broccoli, mushrooms sprouts and other veggies, and you have healthy fast food like nowhere else. The kind of stuff you would probably make yourself at home. The great part is, the you aren't forced to pick a large bowl of noodles; there are choices for those who like portion control to. Even their desserts are unconventional and healthy - like the Rice Krispy Treat. The restaurant has a couple of hundred locations in the midwest, the South and the West.

And finally, the one that you've been waiting for - McDonald's. This restaurant chain with thousands of locations all of the country offers healthy fast food in all kinds of ways. Your Happy Meal for instance offers you a choice of an apple dipper instead of the usual fries, and you can pick fruit juice instead of soda. As for the fries, McDonald's has switched to using canola oil. Their Grilled Chicken Classic offers a great filling and healthy way to start your day and the Egg McMuffin is a great low-calorie choice too.

Of course, the restaurant chain offers you (very famously) many more tempting ways to increase your waist size too. It is all up to you how you make use of the choices available to you.

Looking for Healthy Food to Eat at a Fast Food Chain?

Perhaps it is the Super-Size Me effect. When you go to any one of the 14,000-plus McDonald's locations across the country, more and more, you begin to notice that they offer healthy food to eat in addition to their usually sinful offerings. Your Happy Meals can come with low-fat milk or fruit juice, and not a Coke; you can get apple dippers instead of french fries. And even if your child does choose those fried potato strips instead of the apple dippers, McDonald's fries them in canola oil. Their salads with Paul Newman's Balsamic Vinaigrette and their  low-calorie Egg McMuffin are all great alternatives to their regular delicious, but unhealthy menu offerings. McDonald's isn't the only fast food chain offering healthy food to eat. There are dozens of others across the country.

Consider Einstein Bros., the bagel-serving chain that works out of 700 locations around the country. What exactly is healthy about a bagel, with its butter and high levels of carbohydrates, you ask? At Einstein's you can opt for reduced-fat peanut butter or hummus. You also get bagels that are made out of whole-grain flour and you get to pick a vegan bagel if you want. If you really like bagels, there's a good chance you'll like baked goods, too. While bakeries usually aren't places you go to for healthy, responsible food (these are places where you can choose cheese danishes or sticky buns and have yourself a good sticky time), at one of the thousand or so Panera Bread locations across the country, you get to choose really healthy food to eat. Any sandwich you ask for at Panera Bread comes with a whole-grain option. Any item on the menu that you order can come in half-size as well as the regular full-size, and your chips can come baked, if you so choose. For children, you can order antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken, all-natural peanut butter and organic yogurt. If you are looking for healthy food to eat at a fast food chain, try their Turkey artichoke on focaccia bread. It's pretty great.

When it comes to finding healthy food to eat at a major fast food chain, Au Bon Pain can be hard to beat. Unlike the other healthy fast food chains in this article, Au Bon Pai, with its 300 locations across the country came into business with a specific intention of offering healthy fast food. Their sandwiches, entrées, salads and soups are all made of whole grains, organic meats and vegetables. If you're trying to control your weight, try their special Portions menu that (as you can probably tell), offers small-sized portions. The menu offers you 14 different nutritious items from fruit salads to regular salads - and they all weigh in at under 200 calories. And they provide computers at every outlet to help you calculate the nutritional value of what you order.  Except for their high sodium menus, Au Bon Pain can be a real winner.

Inventive Cheap Healthy Food

"Turning Second-Class Ingredients into a First-Class Meal"

The statistics may be telling us that we in this country are winning the battle against unemployment - that it's lower at 9% than it's been at any time over the past year. But factor in people who are employed only part of the time and so on, and the figure jumps to about twice that. All of which takes us to one unavoidable conclusion - we need to learn how to do a lot more with money we have. Certainly, we've been told (ad nauseum) that it doesn't make any sense to spend money on eating out or on Starbucks lattes (and we get the point already). But that isn't quite enough to help us handle the kind of drop in income and rise in food prices that we've come to experience. If cheap healthy food is what you need to provide your family with so that you can survive and save a little money for an unexpected need, what kind of food do you turn to?

The answer to that would be the kind of food traditional societies in Europe, South America and Asia have always turned to, wealthy or no. They call it peasant cuisine. If that doesn't sound entirely appetizing, it absolutely will, as soon as you take a look at the recipes behind the dishes. These recipes weren’t developed for economic hardship. These kinds of recipes come from countries that are quite developed and well-to-do. If they are sparing in their use of neat for heavy dairy products and if they are high in starch it's because those cultures have discovered how healthful cooking in this way can be - and especially when you learn to use spices the way they have, they can be tasty too. These are cultures that have learned to knock together cheap healthy food with mindbendingly delicious flavors drawn from an exciting and adventurous use of spices. This isn't to push something with hyperbole - you'd agree too - the tangy pasta recipes of Italy, the paella recipes of Spain, and frankfurters from Germany are all examples of how inventive use of cooking technique and spice can turn what would otherwise be a second-class cut of meat into a first-class recipe.

Do you feel that you need an extra dash of salt to add more flavor to a meal? That wouldn't be the healthy way to do it. Instead, try rice vinegar or red wine vinegar or Apple cider vinegar. It'll bring exciting new notes of flavor to your meal that salt just couldn't. Try experimenting with spices like ginger, garlic, rosemary. Not only did these have great health benefits, they make food infinitely more appetizing and imaginative.

Do you marvel at how the Japanese recipes involve slices of meat so thin, they are almost transparent? They didn't learn to do that for their fascination of delicately sliced meat. They had to make do with what they had to make it go farther. As it would turn out, methods like this make for cheap, healthy food. You get less meat in your diet, you save money, and it's healthy.

It could be a new trend in responsible eating, choosing traditional recipes from all around the world. Traditional recipes tend to usually be healthy - because they were designed for times when rich food was just not this easily  available.

Finding Healthy Fast Food

If you love to go through a drive thru after a hard day at work to get dinner, you are not alone. Many people are so busy with kids, careers, and the rigors of running a household that they have no energy to cook a decent meal most nights of the week. Instead of feeding yourself and your family fast food that contributes to high sodium levels, fatigue, and weight gain, think about healthier options. You can find healthy fast food options today when a burger and fries just does not cut it any longer.

You can find healthier options at your favorite fast food restaurant, or you can do with some of the newer places that have better options for the entire menu. Healthy fast food is not a figment of your imagination any longer. You can go to your favorite burger place and you can find salads and fruit options that you and your family are going to love. Just watch the dressings and extras, as they can add a lot of extra calories that you may not count when eating a salad. A roasted chicken sandwich can be good, just toss the bread.

There are also healthy fast food options for your children. The meals they get are often more about the toy than good nutrition. Some places now offer apple sticks, oranges, and other fruit sides that they can get rather than getting fries. You can also skip the kid's menu and get them healthy adult options that they are going to like. You will have to help them with good choices at first, but you may be surprised to see that they make better choices on their own soon enough. Remember, a steamed baked potato is far healthier than fries, but tastes just as good.

If you want more choices, there are different ways to find healthy fast food. You can go to many chains that offer subs with a healthy twist. You can get whatever you want on them so that you know exactly what you are eating. You can also find this option in other stores that sell food locally that are not national chains. They are quick, easy, and better for everyone. Keep your eyes open for newer and more exciting healthy fast food choices. New options are coming your way. Also remember that many restaurants now have a service that allows you to order just about anything they make for pickup. This is better than drive thru, but nearly as quick.

Healthy fast food is not always around when you need it. There are some nutritionists that say you should never eat it if you want to stay healthy. If you have a reasonably healthy lifestyle with good wight control, it probably will not hurt you once in a while to have that burger and fries. Just remember that having it once in a while is a lot different than becoming a regular. If you are struggling with time and convenience, look up tools for cooking healthy meals quickly at home. That may put a stop to your daily stops for food that cannot be good for you.

Healthy Breakfast Food the Healthy Way

With the many diseases that are caused by unhealthy living, it has become necessary for people to change their lifestyles and this has been extended to eating as well. Breakfast is the first meal of the day and can therefore easily set the trend of the day. It is for this reason that one should only have healthy breakfast food. While it has been established that many people would want to have a healthy meal to start their day, there are a number of factors that make them shy away from this. Among these factors are money, resources and time. There are however a number of ways that people cab counter this problems. The first of these is to find healthy and simple recipes. There are very many sources of recipes that can help one come up with a healthy breakfast. If one combs magazines and the internet intently, they are bound to find very helpful recipes.

With the busy lives that people live today it can be quite difficult to come up with the ideal healthy breakfast food. To counter this, it is advisable to buy food in bulk and then stock it in the house. With this method, preparation of the food becomes easy as well because all a person needs to do is to remove them from the fridge for cooking. Proper storage of food is very important if it is to retain its freshness. Vegetables and fruits are normally forgotten at many breakfast tables, which is very regrettable as they play a key role in preventing diseases. Vegetables and fruits should also be stocked in the kitchen in advance so that they will make it to the breakfast table every morning.

Just as with any other meal, creativity can be really helpful when one is making a healthy breakfast food. One should experiment with different kinds of food as well as techniques. This will most likely lead to interesting variations of the foods that are quickly becoming monotonous in many homes. There are very many benefits that are associated with eating good breakfast foods and one of these is the consumption of fewer calories during the day. In addition to this there is also the stronger desire to engage in exercise, which in turn prevents one from becoming obese or overweight. Although breakfast is very important, it does not mean that one should over indulge. When passing in front of breakfast restaurants people are usually enticed with foods such as sugary muffins, donuts, scrambled eggs and syrup covered pancakes that mostly do much to increase the amount of sugar level in the blood. If refined carbohydrates, added sugars and sugars are not eaten in moderation they could affect one’s energy levels and could hinder a weight loss process. Therefore breakfast can only be great when one has it the healthy way.

Just Realized That a Healthy Diet Needs Healthy Fruit?

Some people just happen to be like Jay Leno. When someone mentions the part that healthy fruit and vegetables play in a wholesome diet, they'll say, "Oh, fruit? I had one once; I seem to remember it was rather good". In case you don't remember how Jay Leno figures in all this, he landed himself in a bit of trouble in 2006 claiming that there was no real need for fruits and vegetables in one's diet - as he hadn't had one of these things since 1969. If you feel out-of-touch with fresh produce, if standing at the produce aisle makes you feel like a vegetarian at a deli counter, here are the tips you will need, making your foray into getting healthy fruits and vegetables into your shopping basket.

Let's start with how you pick out peaches, plums and apricots. Now the three of these are fruits that need to be firm, unbruised and immaculately without blemishes. You also don't want to see any wrinkles. The fruit just need to be taut, plump and quite perfect-looking. Once you bring them home, you can't just eat them right away. Since these fruit happen to get very tender and delicate once they are ripe, supermarkets order them when their kind of unripe. That way, they are tough enough to stand a long haul trip on a truck. Once you get your purchase home, you can place them somewhere nice and safe where they can take their time, usually couple of days, to ripen. When they seem aromatic and tender after a couple of days, you can pop them right into the fridge so that they will keep well.

Raspberries (the fruit that look like miniature bunches of grapes) and blackberries have an inimitable tangy, juicy taste. When you pick these fruit out at the supermarket, look closely to see if there is discoloration or mold growing. You basically want healthy, plump and lustrous-looking fruit. These berries are transported in fully-ripened condition. That means you can begin enjoying them the moment you set foot in your front door coming back from the market. But if you wish to keep them for a couple of days, make sure that you put them in an airy plastic bag. Make sure that you don't wash them before you put them in the fridge.

Picking blueberries, you'll find that the best ones have a rich hue with a white powdery cast on top. What you don't want are fruit that have wrinkles or that are shrunken-looking. Blueberries can keep for a week in the fridge. But you need to protect them with plastic wrap if you don't want them to begin to look shriveled and shrunken like the kind you've learned to avoid at the market.

Who can Afford Organic Food in an Economy like This?

A survey on the popularity of green cleaning products recently done, found that people in today's economic climate decline such a purchase in favor of ordinary supplies for a price difference as small as 50 cents. It can't be that different when it comes to organic food. This, routinely, costs as much as a third more than regular produce. What do families do when they would like to go organic for their health but just don't know how, given how expensive it can be?

Selective green-ness is a popular new way to make the move towards organic food. People just go organic for a few important purchases and head for the supermarket for everything else. They choose to go organic for the foods that they eat the most often. For many families, this can be a way to go organic in large part without making huge changes to the budget.

So how do you make the right strategic choices for your organic food purchases? What you need to do is to read up on the kinds of commercially farmed fruits and vegetables that happen to usually be the most pesticide-impregnated. Spinach, strawberries, grapes and potatoes seem to be the most polluted. With broccoli, onion, asparagus, bananas and oranges, even commercial farming isn't usually able to pollute them very much. So choosing organic only for stuff that doesn't belong in the most polluted group can be a way to save money and still reap the benefits of an organic diet. Let's look at a few more strategic choices you can make.

Milk happens to be a particularly important area where you need to turn organic. The production of milk in such large quantities requires very unhealthy factory farming methods. Cows are injected with massive quantities of antibiotics and hormones, and they live in a pesticide-soaked environment. All commercial milk contains some serious levels of chemicals. Since children drink lots of milk, switching to organic here should make a lot of sense.

Potatoes happen to often supply a full half of our entire vegetable diet. Since potatoes grow buried in the earth, they are completely in contact with heavily polluted soil. Switching to organic potatoes can easily make a huge change in the safety level of your diet. Almost all potatoes in the supermarket happen to be quite polluted. The same goes for anything made with peanuts.

It says a lot about how unhealthy the American diet is, that ketchup happens to be an important source of vegetable in the average American diet. Switch to organic ketchup; tomatoes can be some of the most heavily sprayed vegetables on Earth. And the same goes for apples.

Rethinking the Plan on Microwaveable Frozen Foods

It's a great concept - you buy packages of frozen food to cater to your every foodie whim any time of the day or night; when you find yourself hankering after some central American cuisine at 3 AM, you pick out Mayan Harvest Bake or whatever from your well-stocked freezer and microwave it for a few minutes, and there you go. Are frozen foods that simple a deal though? You already know about how frozen foods can be risky if your stash happens to suffer through a power cut. But is there more that you need to know about?

Here's the latest word on frozen foods - it can be kind of tricky following manufacturers’ instructions (given that we all have different models of microwave); if you don't do a good job, the results will really make you fall ill. We’ve been seeing reports of illnesses (salmonella and the like) from poorly microwaved frozen foods for quite a few years now. It got so bad at one point that about three years ago, the government issued health warnings for frozen foods. As far as researchers are concerned, people should forget about microwaves altogether for anything other than reheating food.

Why are microwaves unsuitable? Of course, there is the problem that people have different kinds of microwave and manufacturers kind of make it difficult for people to really understand how intensely they are nuking their frozen foods. But more importantly, microwaves, by their very nature, are unable to heat anything evenly. Everyone knows about how you can place something in a microwave and find cold spots, warm spots and hot spots after what seems like a thorough session in the microwave.

Most food safety experts will tell you that using a microwave to cook meat that is raw is never a good idea. Microwaves don't really do this very well. The problem is, that people don't really adequately understand that frozen food is completely raw food a lot of time. Since freezing happens to be a kind of processing, people somehow seem to assume that there's been a good bit of cooking already done. And that's not really true in many cases - people just pick up their packages of frozen food and they stick them in the microwave like all they need to do is to heat it up a bit. What they are dealing with is raw animal products - and these carry all kinds of dangerous diseases. Everyone's aware of how pork and other kinds of meat need to be cooked very thoroughly to get rid of all the parasites. And yet, somehow impressed with technology or something, they just cook frozen meat unevenly and inadequately, and don't realize what they're doing.

The message therefore is clear. You need to put a lot of research into how to cook frozen foods. It doesn't matter what you get frozen - if it has any animal products at all, the microwave isn't a good idea.

America's Changing over to a Healthy Vegetarian Diet. What about Taste?

Vegetarians have for long enough tried to show the typical omnivore how following a healthy vegetarian diet, you really don't need to give up anything in taste. A veggie burger, they would say, could have just the same taste and texture of your cheeseburger and still manage to not end up killing an animal. But as fans of your traditional beef patty have seen time and time again, there's always something seriously missing in all of these attempts. If you ate it, it was because it helped your conscience - this non-juicy, sadly soggy, non-aromatic thing that was supposed to be good for the planet.

But all of that is more or less in the past today. For a variety of reasons, the notion that a healthy vegetarian diet makes you live longer and keeps disease away has been making inroads into the collective consciousness. Experiments have been made and new kinds of substitute recipes discovered to actually tempt meat-eaters away from their beefy burgers. Expert chefs and experimenting enthusiasts have come together and tried to take vegetarian ingredients and turn them into something that even the most rigidly intolerant meat eater wouldn't disapprove of. Restaurant owners around the country are beginning to take notice of how the American appetite is beginning to turn away from meat and towards a healthy vegetarian diet. When the tide truly turns, they want to be in a position where they can take advantage of it.

The chain of the vegetarian burger restaurants in Los Angeles called Umami, for instance, offers an Earth burger that contains no meat. It just makes do with ingredients like edamame, mushrooms, truffle aioli and ricotta. And yet, it offers an experience to the taste buds that is little different from the kind of dementingly delicious flavor that a traditional burger is capable of. LA, actually, seems to be a kind of center of a movement towards the burgers that can make for a healthy vegetarian diet. At Cru's, also in LA, they make traditional recipes like South American sliders; but they make them with ingredients like sprouts, beans and spices. They're deep-fried, soft and spiced up and absolutely delicious. And it's beginning to happen all over the country now. People don't look at you like you're some kind of New Age nut if you offer a veggie burger on your menu. It's beginning to go mainstream - demand has risen 25%.

With all these new burger chains opening up, and with everyday people giving themselves over to a healthy vegetarian diet, what are the emperors of the burger market - McDonald's and Burger King - doing about it? In vegetarian countries around the world like India, they certainly do offer quite a bit of variety in their vegetarian burger menu. In America though, only Burger King has anything vegetarian on the menu. And it's just one item. If you want to really explore the whole veggie burger scene better, try the book The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet by Joni Newman.

Is Chocolate Milk Good or Bad for You?

People who love chocolate (and who doesn’t?) most likely love chocolate milk, because it’s just like regular old milk, but chocolatier. Who says getting your daily calcium portion doesn’t have to taste good as you wash it down? With chocolate milk, you seemingly get the best of both worlds: healthy and delicious. Unfortunately, there’s another dimension you have to factor in when you consume chocolate milk—sugar. Sure, you might be increasing your calcium intake and building stronger bones, hence avoiding osteoporosis, but you’re also increasing your sugar intake, which increases the chance of developing diabetes. So while chocolate milk is healthy in one way, it’s unhealthy in another, making it overall a potentially unhealthy choice of beverage if consumed excessively.

But before completely writing off chocolate milk as an unhealthy option, keep in mind that like many other foods, consuming chocolate milk is fine as long as it isn’t too frequent. Moderation, not elimination, is the key. Chocolate milk can still be part of a balanced diet as long as you limit your portions and eat other healthy foods that give you the nutrients your body needs. In additional to moderating chocolate milk intake, you can also make your own chocolate milk at home. Instead of buying chocolate milk brands that come loaded with sugar, you can purchase cocoa mix and stir it into your milk yourself. This way, you can enhance your milk with that chocolatey taste you love while keeping track of how much chocolate you’re adding to your beverage. Buying cocoa mix and milk separately can also be a cheaper alternative to purchasing chocolate milk by bulk. Cocoa mix also has a considerable shelf life and will last you a long time. Just make sure that you keep it sealed and stored in a relatively cool area—your handy kitchen cabinet should do the trick just fine.

In conclusion, calcium is an important part of a healthy diet, and chocolate milk is one good way to build up your calcium levels as long as you drink it occasionally and not too much. Think of chocolate milk as a sort of healthier chocolate bar that can have a place in your daily caloric intake as long as it doesn’t contribute too often. There’s nothing wrong with indulging every now and then, but an indulgence is exactly that—an occasional pleasure, but not a frequent occurrence (hopefully). Chocolate milk should be enjoyed guilt free, but also with prudence as well as pleasure.