These days, there are boundless varieties of food that we can indulge in, and with the growing economy, most of us can enjoy most of them and have become spoilt for choices. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as this pattern indicates there is constant growth in the food industry as a whole.

While we continue to ponder on our next meal, we are forgetting another option that has been around since our ancestors’ days, cooking your own meal at home. While eating outside has its own advantages, such as being convenient and practical, cooking your own meal does have its own benefits that always seem to be forgotten by most people.

Here are some list of 5 benefits of home-cooked food that most people over-looked:

Cheaper alternative

Cooking at home can get much cheaper, especially if you plan to cook for the whole family or plan for a few days’ meal. Keep a precise list of ingredients before you go to a supermarket and stick with it. This is to prevent you from buying unnecessary items, which may defeat the purpose of saving money in the first place.

Healthier choice

Most take-out food contains high salt and sugar. Sometimes to make profit, many food stalls also use cheaper, lower quality ingredients to maximize their profit. This may result in high amounts of trans fats and saturated fats (both of which are bad fats) existing in your food, and increasing your blood cholesterol.

All of this can be avoided if you are choosing your own ingredients. You can always choose a food with good fats, lower the salt and sugar content, and choose leaner meat. This will definitely improve your health and lifestyle.

Avoiding food allergens

When you cook at home, you can control the ingredients more carefully and avoid any food allergies, especially when you or other members of the family have food allergies. As some food allergies can even lead to fatal repercussions, this is a very important factor that has to be taken seriously.

Family bonding time

Cooking and eating together with your family can help to foster healthy relationships among family members. Research even shows that when we cook and eat with our children, it can help to improve each other’s mental health and promote healthy eating habits to our children.

Saving the environment

This may sound a bit cliché but cooking at home can actually contribute, no matter slight, to save our environment. Most food establishments waste so much food daily, and this problem is getting more prominent in developed countries. In Singapore alone, the amount of food wasted is around 809,000 tonnes in 2017, and that figure is expected to rise.

Moreover, food delivery and long winded restaurant supply chains cause high degrees of emission to the environment. By cooking at home, we can control our own portion and buy only what we need. These small acts can be the first step to save the environment.

There are plenty other benefits of home-cooked food which are not listed here. These are glimpses of what we can reap if we put a little more effort to prepare our own food from our own kitchen. Thanks for taking the time to read this article. We hope that this can be beneficial to you and help you start better and healthier habits of cooking at home.