Cooking as a family: good for your health and your pocket

Cooking together as a family has many benefits that go beyond learning healthy lifestyle habits from childhood: it helps to strengthen the relationship with your partner and children, and to discover the skills that each member of the family has.

This is because cooking with family, friends or for yourself makes you exercise many skills, such as planning meals, making the shopping list, and socializing, since you must share different tasks with more people.

From the point of view of food, some studies reinforce the idea that when you cook at home you eat fewer calories, since you are aware that you should make healthy choices, and therefore reduce the consumption of carbohydrates, sugar and fats.

Among the benefits of cooking as a family are:

• Develop healthy lifestyle habits. Children are like little sponges; they absorb all the information around them. If they get used to preparing meals from childhood, they will assume it as something natural and incorporate into their routine. In addition to learning about cooking, children will learn teamwork and will improve the spirit of service. It is important that children go shopping with their parents so that they get used to buying fresh and healthy food. They will also learn to read and understand product labels, to recognize the freshness of food and to know how to combine some foods with others.
• Make your diet healthier. When you prepare lunch or dinner yourself, you have more control over what you eat. This is because when handling food you are more aware of what you eat and you tend to cook healthier foods, and with less salt, sugar or trans fats, which are common in prepared meals. These types of fats are harmful to the body because they are not well metabolized, increase cholesterol levels and cardiovascular risk.
• Improve your knowledge of food and the way it is prepared. There are many ways to cook food, and some are healthier than others. For example, it is preferable to cook on the grill, steamed or baked than frying or dressing with fatty sauces.
• Protect the environment by buying local products. Children must learn to choose the products that are in the market and know the whole process from when the food leaves its origin (farmlands, ocean ...) until it reaches the table. Choosing local products helps to maintain the economy of the area, supports farmers and breeders, and protects the environment, since CO2 emissions produced by the transportation of food are reduced.
• Save money. Eating at home is very beneficial for your pocket since it is usually cheaper than eating out. In addition, you can do ‘batch cooking’ preparing meals for the whole week in advance, using the leftovers to create new and more imaginative recipes.
• Eat the right amount of calories. Restaurant servings are usually much larger than those served at home, so they have more calories and promote weight gain. Cooking at home makes it easier to control what you eat and how you cook, which helps control weight.