Want to up your home-cooking game? Here are 5 tips to make the dishes you serve at home extra healthy.

1. Choose your oil. Everything starts with the oil. Choosing the right type of cooking oil will help ensure that your dish is healthy. Choose oil that doesn’t need chemicals to be extracted from the source. Oils like coconut oil and olive oil usually don’t need harmful chemicals to be extracted. Other oils like Canola and vegetable oils actually use solvent like hexane for oil to be extracted. Even with olive and coconut, check the label to see how the oil is extracted and processed. Generally, stay away from refined, bleached, and deodorized oils.
2. Never reuse your oil. Never reuse your cooking oil. Cooking oil that is used more than once can be carcinogenic since the molecular structure of the oil changes once heated over and over again. As much as possible, use your cooking oil only once.
3. Add some indigenous superfood. With any of the dishes you prepare, try adding indigenous superfoods when you can. Examples of indigenous superfoods include moringa leaves (malunggay), turmeric (luyang dilaw), inexpensive leaves like saluyot and alugbati. However, keep in mind that one good ingredient won’t cancel out all the other bad ingredients you decide to put in the dish. So strive to choose healthy for all your ingredients.
4. Check your pantry staples. Your pantry staples might seem harmless, but it pays to read the label. There might be hidden harmful ingredients in your soy sauce, vinegar, fish sauce, etc. Not all pantry staples are created equal. Believe it or not, some commercial brands dilute their product with MSG and food coloring to make their products more profitable. So, read the label and check for ingredients that you don’t want or don’t understand and switch it with the real stuff accordingly. If you haven’t heard of an ozonator, it would be good to check it out. An ozonator is a machine that helps sanitize food, whether meat or fresh produce, and rid it of pesticides, salmonella, bacteria, etc. Drinking ozonated water is also beneficial to the body.
5. Choose organic. When you can and if the budget permits, choose to buy organic. Buying organic may be more expensive but denying your body of pesticides and artificial hormones is worth it. Remember, the money you spend on truly healthy food is the money you will save rather than spend on maintenance medicine or hospitalization.