Healthy baking ingredient swaps

Every week expert nutritionist and clinical hypnotherapist Lowri Turner answers your health, fitness and wellbeing questions. This week: Healthy baking ingredient swaps

Q: ‘I love baking but want to watch my waistline. Any great ingredient swaps I could try to keep the calorie count down?’

A: While the fashion for home baking has a certain retro appeal – I love all the old tins and cake stands – the result can be awful for everyone’s waistlines. All that sugar, fat and white flour is the very antithesis of healthy eating. Fortunately, there are some clever substitutions you can make which will improve your results, muffin top-wise.

First, the sugar. There are lots of alternatives to conventional sugar. Xylitol is a ‘polyol sugar’, which comes from tree sap. Sounds horrible, I know, but it tastes sweet. Like Stevia, or Splenda, it is white and granular and you use it spoon for spoon like regular sugar, but it has fewer calories and is much lower GI.

An interesting natural alternative is jaggery, which is a brown powder, also made from the sap of an Indian tree. It’s lower cal than sugar, lower GI and very high in iron and vitamin B12 (important for vegetarians). It bakes really well, with a brown sugar taste, so you could give that a go, too.

Next, the flour. There is no doubt that white flour makes for a very light cake, but it’s had all the nutrients stripped out of it. You can simply substitute half of it for wholemeal – the cake may be a bit heavier so you may want to increase the amount of baking powder. Or… you could reduce the carb content by substituting normal flour for ground almonds, or soya, quinoa or chickpea flour. All of these are more ‘claggy’ and gluten free, so to get a good rise, you may need to add some xanthum gum. Take a look at Grace Cheetham’s book Simply Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free for advice on that. Or check out my delicious sunflower seed breakfast loaf.

Lastly, the fat and eggs in cakes. Eggs are a brilliant superfood, so there is no need to swap these out! But where butter, oil or margarine are used to give a moist texture try adding grated courgette, carrot or beetroot or mashed banana instead. Try my recipe for Banana, Apple and Walnut bread in my book The S Factor Diet: The Happiest Way To Lose Weight (E-book £9.99 www.thesfactordiet.com).

If you have a question for Lowri, please email lowr@lowriturner.com

Lowri Turner is a nutritionist and clinical hypnotherapist. She sees clients in North London. To make an appointment, please go to www.lowriturner.com.

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