Baby Steps in the Kitchen, Part 2

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**This post has been entered in Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family and Real Food Wednesdays at Kelly the Kitchen Kop!**

Time for the next three Baby Steps in the Kitchen! I've decided to do all the kitchen posts on Saturdays because I have a feeling that kitchen baby steps are going to be the most popular. On Tuesdays I'll be doing the other Baby Steps posts (personal care, cleaning products, etc.). Look for the first one in the personal care series coming up this Tuesday!!

In case you missed the first three Baby Steps, check it out here! Then come back and read this one. :)

Now, here are my "4, 5, and 6" steps to healthier eating:

4) Replace white sugar with healthier alternatives (sucanat, raw honey, rapidura)

5) Get rid of aluminum cookware

6) Buy good milk, or milk substitute (coconut milk)

Why these?

White sugar is in ALL our food (that doesn't contain high fructose corn syrup, that is). It's in all the cakes, candies, cereals.... We eat WAY too much sugar, in general. Think about the recipes you bake at home -- many quick bread and cake recipes call for 2 cups of sugar! This much is just not necessary (did you know that in a lot of recipes, you can simply reduce the sugar by up to half without replacing it with anything and the recipe will still turn out well?), and white sugar is completely devoid of nutrients. It's awful, awful stuff. But right now I'm not going to ask you to cut sugar out of your diet -- yet. Instead, reach for a healthier alternative. Real maple syrup, raw honey, and sucanat are the best options. Rapidura is also very good. Turbinado sugar is not bad. Blackstrap molasses are good, but of course have a strong, unique flavor. When you're buying sugar next time, select a different variety. Try putting honey in your tea, maple syrup in your coffee. Use Rapidura or sucanat for baking (and if you remember, use a little less!). You'll feel better for it.

Aluminum is a huge problem. It's a metal that we don't need in our bodies at all, and which can cause serious health problems over time. When we use it for cookware, the metal leaches into our food and gets into our body. Most people who have some aluminum cookware also have cookware that isn't aluminum, and cookware that doesn't contain aluminum is easy to obtain. (It's also a good idea to get rid of any cookware that is coated with Teflon, but we'll get to that later.) We recently threw out a couple of pans that were bad, but most of our cookware was safe. OLD cookware is what you need to look out for now.

Milk is a big problem, in modern times. Unfortunately, it's all pasteurized (a process that was invented to purify beer and other alcohol, NOT milk) and homogenized (which breaks down the fat molecules into a size and shape that our body doesn't recognize). The factory farmed dairy cows are also very sick, given hormones (that is slowly changing), poor diet, and the milk they produce is unhealthy to begin with (which is why it needs pasteurized). Something else to consider is that calcium in this milk is not really useable by the body, so the argument "but you have to drink milk to get calcium!" is really moot. However, there are other options. You can buy milk that is non-homogenized, low-temp pasteurized, and grass-fed. Raw milk is even better (but not easy to obtain in many areas). Raw milk can be obtained by purchasing a share in a herd of cows, or by purchasing it for "pet use." These are common now. One caution: many brands of organic milk are "ultrapasteurized," which is even worse for you -- don't buy that! If you don't want to or can't buy good cow's milk, goat milk or coconut milk are very good options. We use coconut milk, which contains medium-chain fatty acids and a lot of great nutrients.

Those are my next three baby steps! Right now I have 24, so expect this series to continue for at least another 6 weeks.

What are your next three steps? Have you started on any of these? What do you think?

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