Healthy Cooking: 14 Scary Recipe Ingredients

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How to tame the dietary 'bad boys' lurking in your favorite recipes -- without sacrificing taste.

By Elaine Magee, MPH, RD
WebMD Weight Loss Clinic - Feature

Reviewed By Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD/LD

When it comes to healthy cooking, there are monsters lurking out there in our favorite recipes. These are ingredients that can be downright frightening to anyone trying to eat healthfully and cut calories. And yet for many of them, there's no perfect substitute -- such as for bacon, brie, bleu cheese, whipped cream, or browned butter.

Lisa Young, PhD, RD, a professor of nutrition at New York University and author of The Portion Teller Plan, believes the worst ingredients are those that are high in fat, particularly saturated fat, like butter.

"Fats have more calories per gram than carbs or protein, so they are the biggest weight loss offenders," she says.

The trouble is that sometimes, nothing but butter will do, says David Joachim, food writer and author of The Food Substitutions Bible. "Butter tastes like butter and nothing else," says Joachim. "Margarine? It's not even close!"

You can't "brown" margarine, for example. When butter is browned, its unmistakable, amazing caramelization flavors arise.

14 Scariest Recipe Ingredients

Of course, there's no need for butter to get all the bad press. There are at least a dozen common ingredients that should send up a red flag if you're watching fat and/or calories.

It's not unusual, for example, for a recipe to call for a quarter cup of mayonnaise per serving. That's 396 calories and 44 grams of fat -- and that's not including any other ingredient in the recipe.

It's also not unusual for soup, sauce, and dessert recipes to call for a quarter-cup of liquid heavy whipping cream per serving. That would add 205 calories and 22 grams of fat per serving, all by itself.

Light whipping cream is only a little better, with 174 calories and 18.5 grams of fat. Half-and-half is the best of the three, with 79 calories and 7 grams of fat per quarter cup. But if half and half is an ingredient in a cream soup, each serving could contain a cup -- which would add 300+ calories (and 28+ fat grams).

Two other popular fatty ingredients, says Young, are sour cream and cheese. "Using low fat or part skim varieties of these products really helps a lot," Young adds.

Puff pastry can also get you into trouble with artery-clogging trans fats. One serving of Pepperidge Farms Puff Pastry Shells has 5 grams of trans fats, and their Puff Pastry Sheets contribute 4 grams of trans fats per serving.

And the list doesn't stop there. Here are 14 common and super-scary recipe ingredients, along with the amount of calories, fat, and saturated fats you'll find in a typical serving:

Healthy Cooking: Taming Bad Boy Ingredients in Recipes

So faced with all this, what's an aspiring healthy cook to do?