Why "Homemade" Doesn't Mean "Healthy"

We've all heard it before "it's homemade, so it's healthy." (I know I have). Well... Not so much.

First of all, I'm not saying that you can't MANIPULATE a regular batch of, let's say, a batch of chocolate chip cookies. For example, you can replace the highly processed (not even real wheat) all purpose flour from the store with almond, coconut, oat, rice, or any other gluten free flour, OR homegrown dwarf wheat!, and use farm fresh chicken eggs (preferably from your backyard chickens). You CAN make homemade things healthy, but every homemade thing is definitely Not healthy all the time.

Now "homemade" sounds good to everyone, right? If you had to choose a box of cookies from the store, or freshly baked HOMEMADE cookies, which would you choose? That's right; the homemade ones, obviously. Why do you think food companies use the terms "just like grandma used to make." and "homemade"? Well, because it sounds good, that's why. We all know that (in most cases) grandmothers are the best cooks, right? Most of the time they are BECAUSE they make things from scratch. I mean, mixing chocolate chips, flour, butter, eggs, and sugar all together is fun and it tastes WAY better than squeezing out some dough from the refrigerator section of the store on a baking sheet and calling it good eats. Although, just because grandma mixed some ingredients together doesn't mean they're healthy ingredients. Sure you know MORE of what's going into your cookies and later into your body, but how much do you REALLY know about those store bought ingredients? This isn't to say that homemade is ALWAYS bad, but it's not necessarily ALWAYS good either. Here's why:

Now that we know that "homemade" tastes better, and it IS better nutritionally, because you know (kind of) what's going into your chocolate chip cookies, and there's not AS MUCH of those additives and preservatives, but why isn't homemade food always healthy? Well, what's in those chocolate chips you bought there, Granny? In a bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips you find sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin, and natural flavors. First problem is sugar. That's a lot of (bleached, highly processed) sugar to chocolate ratio. Second, milk fat (also highly processed). Third, soy lecithin; now, we all know about soy. Fourth, natural flavors?! Why are they adding 'flavors' to chocolate? I want to taste the chocolate, not the 'flavors'. Sure they're 'natural', but are they necessary? You will never hear me say that REAL chocolate isn't good for you. Those chocolate chips have real chocolate in them, I know, but are all those additives necessary? I don't think so. All I want to see in a bar of chocolate, or a bag of chocolate chips is cocoa liquor. That's all that's really needed. This is just one ingredient in these cookies and it already sounds too iffy for me, so we won't go into all the other ingredients right now (we already kind of did earlier actually).

I know I'm kind of rabbit trailing here (give me a break I'm new to this blog thing), but now we know that "homemade" doesn't necessarily mean "healthy", how do we make our homemade chocolate chip cookies as healthy as possible (with them still tasting good). In an ideal world, we'd grow and grind our own dwarf wheat, or oats (for a gluten free option) for the flour, milk our grass fed cow and churn the milk for butter, use honey from our backyard honeybees, or grow our own cane sugar, use eggs from our backyard chickens; but I'm just daydreaming here. I'm not telling you to go as far as to grow Theobroma Cacao trees in your backyard and make your own chocolate (that would be nearly impossible). All I'm saying is, there are much better choices than that bag of nestle chocolate chips and that snow white (because it has been bleached) sugar. We can see now why you shouldn't assume something is healthy just because it's homemade.

Everything can't be perfectly homegrown and homemade, but you can make wiser decisions in the grocery store. Buy 100% chocolate, melt it down, and add raw honey to sweeten. Use almond, or oat flour instead of the bleached white all purpose flour. Buy minimally processed grass fed milk and butter. Although it's not going to kill you if you eat traditionally homemade cookies every once and a while. I won't judge. Just don't be eating a batch everyday. You shouldn't eat healthified cookies that much either. I'll admit I do eat a whole lot of things I'm not proud of, (like a batch of store bought cookies here, and there) but I'm trying to get better about what I put in my body. After all, food is supposed to nourish us, not make us feel like crap and give us health issues. All I'm saying is that better food choices is a hard, on going process and it's hard to stay away from all the unhealthy food choices in this day and age, but we should always be trying to better ourselves and the first step is to know how.

Now go and enjoy some cookies,

Amy