Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking with Dairy Products

Video Transcript

"I’m Kirsten Herbes and I am a registered dietician and health educator. One of the main sources of fat in our normal cooking process comes from dairy food. A lot of dairy foods naturally have a lot of fat simply because they do come from an animal. However, thankfully there are a lot of easy substitutions on the market that you can reach for instead of the regular full fat dairy. The main one in the dairy group is obviously milk. Most of us should be drinking 2 percent and if not, skim milk. Whole milk should only be had by anybody under the age of 2. After the age of 2, from a nutritional perspective, no reason to drink whole milk. The idea that you want to get to eventually is skim milk or non-fat milk. They are one in the same. They literally have zero grams of fat per serving. Two percent milk even though it sounds like it is a much reduced fat milk still has about 5 grams of fat per serving in the milk. Ideally try to get the skim milk. If you can’t do the leap from whole directly to skim, do it step wise. Go from whole milk to 2 percent and try to reduce to either one percent or half percent and eventually you do want to land on skim milk. Skim milk can be easily substituted in most recipes just for whole milk; it won’t affect the consistency of your recipe at all. Another item in the dairy booth that carries a lot of fat is regular fat yogurt. You will see right here this yogurt just says plain yogurt on it which means it is just a regular full fat yogurt. None of the fat has been removed. This yogurt made from whole milk. If we turn it around and look at the nutritional label on this yogurt, you will see right here the total fat grams per serving. Serving size of this yogurt is listed up here as 1 cup. Per 1 cup there is 4 cups in this container. You would consume 8 grams of fat. That means a total of 32 grams of fat in this container and this is fat that can easily be eliminated. What you want to reach for instead of this whole fat yogurt is either a low fat variety or non-fat variety. I happened to have a flavored low fat variety. Here they do complain. You will see right here it says low fat yogurt and this one on the side says all natural non-fat yogurt. Both again can be substituted for the full fat yogurt and in any recipe you make it will not affect the end result. Another item that we use often in cooking is heavy whipping cream. Now heavy whipping cream is mainly fat. The fat is part of the milk that is skimmed off the top of the milk so we want to try to reduce this whenever possible. Heavy whipping cream it if is used in a recipe to add substance and volume to the recipe will be harder to substitute. In another segment I will show you how to substitute for whipping cream as well. Last thing I am going to mention in this group even though it is really no longer milk, it is simply fat as regular butter but this is obviously our main fat source if we are cooking with something that came from the dairy source. Regular butter whenever possible should be avoided in recipes. You can substitute it for yogurt based margarine type butter but when you do choose margarine try to avoid anything that has Trans fat that is listed as one of the ingredients. "