If you study true nutrition long enough, you soon realize that your quest to provide more nourishing food for your family is going to be an uphill battle.  Not only will you have your own poor nutritional habits to overcome, but you will at times feel as if you are taking on the entire and very powerful food industry.  It can seem like a daunting project indeed.

So how do you start?

The first thing to remember is: don’t do it all at once.  It is a big job, and if you try to radically change your eating habits overnight, you will burn out from the learning curve alone, not to mention your family may not be ready for the sudden change.  You will have more success if you make the transition one step at a time.  Here are some suggestions for getting started.

Your pantry and refrigerator are likely to contain some ingredients that have no nutritional value and may even
be toxic.  Fortunately, some of those ingredients are also easy to substitute for superior ones which can be used the same way.  The most painless substitution you’ll ever make will be switching from refined table salt to sea salt.  Sea salt is more expensive than regular salt.  However, you will most likely go through it slowly enough that you will hardly notice the price difference.  Sea salt will be a bit more moist than refined salt and have a gray color, which will make it harder to shake out of a salt shaker.  Celtic brand sea salt sells a little ceramic grinder which will allow you to grind your sea salt like you can grind pepper corns.  It may take a little more sea salt to attain the same level of saltiness, but it also has a more full flavor.  Otherwise, you use sea salt just like regular salt.  You should be able to find sea salt in your local grocery store.

Next on the hit list is white sugar.  Many people substitute raw honey for sugar in baking recipes.  You can get great results but it does involve tweaking the recipe a bit.  An easier substitution is to use Rapadura or Sucanat instead.  These are dehydrated cane extracts, which means you get not only the sweetness, but all the nutrients normally present in sugarcane.  The crystals are dark brown in color and sweet, and can be easily substituted for refined sugar.  This is not to be confused with brown sugar or turbinado sugar, which is merely refined sugar with a bit of molasses added back in.

Then there’s white flour.  White flour is as worthless as white sugar for nutritional content and yet it makes up so much of what we eat and bake.  It can be substituted for whole wheat flour made from soft wheat berries, also known as pastry berries.  That flour feels as soft as white flour and works really well.  You can  bake Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies using whole pastry flour with excellent results.  Your baked good will have a heartier taste than their white-flour based counterparts and leave you feeling more satisfied.  You can definitely use whole wheat flour in bread, but it’s best to follow a recipe designed for whole wheat flour as it does behave differently when the bread is rising, and it may take practice to get it right.

By replacing refined salt, white sugar and white flour with sea salt, unrefined sugar and whole wheat flour, you have taken the first few steps to providing more nutritious food for your family without making any radical lifestyle changes.  Just substituting a few ingredients doesn’t seem so hard and it’s a great start.

Good Luck!