12 Steps to Whole Foods

Creating Delicious Whole-Food Treats
How Do I Convert a Treat Recipe to Be Nutritious?
Many people don’t know that the six “magic tricks” to making any cookie or cake recipe much more nutritious
are really rather simple.
1. Replace the white flour with an equal amount of finely ground soft white wheat flour. You can use other
types of wheat, but soft white wheat most closely resembles white flour, without nutritional loss of the
germ and the fiber loss of the bran.
2. Replace the sugar with raw, organic coconut palm sugar or the less optimal Sucanat (dehydrated,
unrefined organic cane juice). For powdered sugar, blend the coconut sugar or Sucanat in the Blendtec
until it is very fine. Or you can substitute raw honey or agave for better nutrition. Honey is high in
vitamins and minerals and agave has a lower glycemic index. But if you’re using a liquid sweetener,
you can generally cut the amount by half because agave and especially honey are much sweeter than
sugar or Sucanat. With liquid substitutions, you must experiment with the flour amount, increasing it by
one-fourth to one-third the amount called for. See Appendix A (page 337) for explanations of good and
not-so-good sugar replacements.
3. Replace shortening, margarine, butter, or oil with coconut oil. Of those three, butter is preferable, if you
choose not to use coconut oil, as shortening and margarine are full of fake trans fats, and butter does
have medium-chain fatty acids and some positive nutritional qualities. If you don’t like the taste of
coconut added by virgin, unprocessed coconut oil, use a more processed version of it, which will have
little or no flavor. This option is still much better than the usual fats used in cookie recipes since
coconut oil does not create trans fats even when heated to high temperatures. (See page 99.)
4. Use only organic, free-range eggs for a good balance of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids. Or you can
omit the eggs and instead use 1 Tbsp. of ground flax seeds or 1 Tbsp. whole chia seeds mixed with
3 Tbsp. water for each egg in the recipe. (This is preferable to using lecithin, which is a fractionated soy
product. Soy products are overused in our food supply, leading to a host of hormonal imbalances.)
5. Keep aluminum-free baking powder on hand. The verdict is pretty clear that ingesting aluminum (as
with commercial baking powder) or absorbing it through the skin (as with commercial antiperspirants)
causes Alzheimer’s and a host of other problems.
6. Use sea salt or, best of all, Original Crystal Himalayan Salt for all the minerals in the whole food rather
than the processed salt stripped of nutrition, and also cut the amount of salt called for in half. (See
page 277.)
300 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw