Health of a family resides in the kitchen of the house. It is very true indeed. The health of a person is directly related to the food he eats. Mostly people at home, depend on the home cooked meals, which are trusted to be healthy. But is home food really healthy now days? It has been observed that with the changing patterns of life styles and living, the eating habits of people have changes drastically. Mostly people are munching junk food or they end up living on a coffee-diet. The factors responsible for these conditions are many. Shortage of time, living your life in haste and to save time, is few to number. What is to be done is to have home food, it is said. But is it safe to rely on it completely. Those were the days when the home cooked food was enriched with goodness of the ingredients. Today, mostly the lady of the house is working. She is not able to devote enough time to cook food maintaining the balance and retaining the nutrient quality of food. To cook quick food, microwave is used so often that the concept of boiling and steam is erasing. It is not realized that the microwave, as the name says, has harmful rays and short-length waves coming out, which not only degrade the quality of food but also a leading cause of cancer in humans. So the use of microwave should be reduced.

Also to save the time spent in grocery shopping, people are usually seen over -crowding their freezers with frozen meat and dairy products. It is a cause of many diseases. Nothing can compete the freshness and goodness of freshly bought foodstuff. The fat content in these meats is really high and is not good for the heart.

Also the emerging concept of canned food is equally harmful. In haste, these are seen piled up in kitchens. The fact that these tinned foodstuffs have very high sodium content, for preserving purpose and it end up in giving blood pressure problems to many. Focus should be on freshly purchased vegetables and fruits.

Another mistake done in cooking for kids these days is making the food look delicious and attractive, rather than the nutritional value of the food. The food ingested by the kids today is made fancier, just to make them eat it. Excessive use of sauces, dressings, spread and artificial colors, are not only lacking nutritional value but also makes these kids put on a lot of weight. These children when grow up to be obese, feed on junk, as they are used to such kind of a food.

Just by changing the methods of cooking, such as using steam instead of deep-frying food, scrubbing the vegetables in spite of peeling the vegetables, not only retain the nutrients but also avoid many health problems which persists by doing the otherwise. If you possess an own garden, you can even grow your own healthy vegetables!

It can be well said that the home food cooked in way that it is noting more than food similar to the food available outside, just served in home platter, is not good enough to make you healthy. It is the method and the style of cooking that matters.