The Best Food To Eat
31st January, 2026
As a Dietitian, people are always asking me what the best food is to eat. Is this food better than that? Usually, the answer is to eat a variety of foods from the five food groups and eat in moderation. This translates to meaning keeping ‘everyday’ foods as your usual daily eating habit, and having the option of ‘sometimes’ or ‘discretionary’ foods in small amounts and very infrequently.
When asked what the best kind of food is to eat, I will often say food that is home cooked.
Home cooked meals used to be the norm in my grandparent’s generation where 3 meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner, were home cooked daily for the family. Cooking a meal is a gesture of love, using nutritious foods and eating together was assumed normal.
Nowadays, with busy families, with different work and activity schedules, cooking in bulk and having leftovers, eating out, ordering take-away or using ready meals is common. Cooking is now often thought of as a chore especially when there can be a shortcut.
Home cooked meals are a very important part of eating a healthy balanced diet that meets your individual needs to keep you healthy for a variety of reasons:
- Home cooked foods often have less added sugars, fats and salt:
Foods processed at a large scale often loses its natural flavour.So, food companies add ingredients to manage this such as extra sugar, fats, salt, spices and other ‘flavours’ to bring out more flavour or even to disguise the flavour of older meat. This can also make these foods questionable as to whether they are ‘everyday’ foods or ‘sometimes foods’
Eating more energy, sugar, fat and salt than your body needs increases your risk of developing dental caries, diabetes, cardiovascular disease (hypertension/high cholesterol), some cancers, fatty liver and a range of other health conditions.
When cooking at home you can control how much salt, sugar and fat as well as the types of fats and carbohydrates you eat depending on your body’s nutrition requirements.
- Home cooking gives you control over your food portions
When you make home cooked meals or even desserts, you can portion out the serving size to meet your body’s needs and not the one the food manufacturer decides.
For example, if you have done a big workout, you may need a meal with more carbohydrate and/or protein that what you might usually choose.If you have been quite sedentary you may need less carbohydrates.
- Home cooking gives you more control of where the food you eat is grown and where your money goes.
Home cooked meals mean you have control of purchasing locally grown ingredients, supporting local farmers and your community.
Often buying pre-prepared foods or meals means you do not know where the ingredients come from, often from various places all over the world, meaning huge food miles and funding big international food corporations.
- Home cooking helps us connect with our bodies and the people around us
When we eat a home cooked meal at the table together, we truly appreciate the effort put in and the food tastes better as the ingredients have been cooked fresh. We often wait for the food to be served, giving our bodies time to take in all the sensory information of the food and prepare our body for digesting it. In conversation we can often eat slower giving our body time to send out satiety signals to prevent over-eating.
Studies have shown that kids learn to eat a wider range of foods to meet their body’s need and older people at risk of malnourishment eat better when eating together.
Cooking is an essential life skill. With our multicultural influences and foodie culture, we tend to think we need to be Master Chefs and cook a huge range of culturally varied meals in a week. However, this need not be the case.
Simple home cooked meals can be a:
- cheese and salad sandwich or wrap
- bowl of cereal: oats with added nuts, fresh fruit and a dollop of Greek yoghurt
- salad with a can of tuna and a cob of corn
- roast chicken and oven-roasted vegetables: potato, pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant, capsicum
- one pot casserole
More complex meals can be a:
- stir fry
- spaghetti bolognaise
- curry
Here are my top tips to help you cook more often:
- Plan cooking time into your day
- Cook with others, split up the cooking tasks
- Learn to cook and teach other’s to cook, especially kids
- If living alone, offer to cook for a friend or relative regularly
- Put on some music to help you feel good whilst cooking
- Cook extra such as for the next day even if it is just some extra veggies or some freezer meals, to ease the load.
- Accept that kitchen catastrophes happen, and learn from mistakes
So, the next time you are thinking about what is for dinner, know that home cooked food is always best, and cook up a storm!