Make Your Favorite Recipes Even Healthier!

There are now hundreds of low-fat cookbooks available, and it should be easy to find ways to prepare delicious, healthy meals. However, if you're old enough to remember the 1950s, you know that high-fat, high-cholesterol foods were once the bedrock of cooking. Are your shelves lined with cookbooks that really don't support your new healthier lifestyle? Want to rework some of your favorite recipes into healthier versions? These tips will help.

In order to see what works and what doesn't, start gradually and change one thing at a time. For some things, there simply are no low-fat alternatives; there is, for example, no way to make to make peanut-butter cookies without peanut butter.

Likewise, many people have experimented with low-fat cheesecake, but with disappointing results. It may be that you simply need to adjust your expectations when adjusting your recipes.

The following list of suggestions may help you get started, but the possibilities for innovation are limited only by your imagination.

• Ground meats are easy to replace. Try substituting an equivalent amount of cooked grains (such as rice, bulgur, couscous or wheat berries) or legumes (beans or soy grits) or steamed vegetables that have been chopped finely (squash, broccoli, carrots or mushrooms); or use tofu in any of its many forms. If you want to keep some of the meat for flavor, replace only a part of it, and use the leanest cuts possible.
• If a recipe calls for dairy products and you want to replace them altogether, try using an equivalent amount of tofu. If you simply want to reduce the fat content, use low-fat or skim varieties of milk, cheese and yogurt. Cheese, for example, varies widely in fat content. Whereas an ounce and a quarter of cream cheese contain almost 12.5 grams of fat, the same-size portion of part-skim mozzarella has only 5.6 grams. A number of reduced-fat cheeses are now on the market, and while some of them are not very good for eating plain, many can easily be incorporated into a favorite recipe.

  If you're trying to maximize your calcium intake, don't worry. Lowering the fat in cheese may actually increase the calcium content.

• A cup of regular sour cream has almost 500 calories, but a cup of low-fat sour cream has less than 300; low-fat yogurt has less than 150 calories.

  You can also try a combination of low-fat yogurt and low-fat mayonnaise to substitute for sour cream. Or you can make your own faux sour cream by combining a cup of low-fat cottage cheese, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 2 tablespoons low-fat mayonnaise, 1/4 cup of buttermilk and the zest of half a lemon.

  Blend the ingredients until creamy smooth. This makes 1 1/2 cups and is much lower in fat and cholesterol than the real thing. The best part? You'll hardly notice the difference in taste or texture. This recipe comes from Laurel Robertson, who published Laurel's Kitchen (Nilgiri, 1981), one of the first vegetarian cookbooks, way back in the 1980s.

• If you would normally sauté in butter or margarine, try substituting a highly unsaturated vegetable oil like safflower or canola. You probably won't need more than a tablespoon, and maybe even less if you use a nonstick pan. To make sure, don't pour it out of the bottle, but measure it out a teaspoonful at a time. If the pan gets too dry, add a little water or wine instead of more oil.
• There are really no good substitutes for sodium that will produce the same salty flavor. However, if you cut down on the amount of sodium in your diet, in a week or two you will realize that everything tastes a little fresher without it. If you experiment with different combinations of herbs and spices, you can probably eliminate added salt almost entirely. Remember, canned and other processed foods are usually high in sodium.
• Use white grape, apple, orange, white cranberry or pineapple juice as a nonfat dressing or marinade. To cut the fruit flavor, combine the juice with a defatted chicken broth. Or just use flavored vinegars and forget the oil entirely.
• If a fancy dessert calls for ice cream or custard, try substituting low-fat or nonfat frozen yogurt, ice milk or sorbet. If a recipe calls for whipped cream, you can't really switch to nonfat milk, but try half-and-half or whole milk. It won't eliminate the fat but will reduce it.
• Use applesauce instead of oil, margarine or butter in many baked products. For each half-cup substitution, you'll save more than 900 calories and 100 grams of fat. In recipes where oil is the only liquid, try half applesauce and half buttermilk.
• Use puréed prunes or baby-food prunes as a fat-replacer in chocolate baked goods. The dark color and rich flavor of the chocolate disguise the prunes and for each half-cup of prune pureée, you'll save nearly 800 calories and 100 grams of fat.
• Use marshmallow crème instead of margarine or butter in recipes for fluffy frosting. It adds creaminess and no fat (but, of course, is still high in calories).

Sheldon Margen, M.D., is a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley. Dale A. Ogar is managing editor of the University of California at Berkeley "Wellness Letter." They are the authors of The Wellness Lowfat Cookbook (Random House, 1994) and The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition (Random House, 1992).