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Create Your
Healthy Kitchen

What makes a healthy kitchen? It's simplicity, freshness, color and warmth. Cooking is magical, where you create with fire, air, water and earth, and your love, to make nourishing meals.

Cooking is also practical and has many tools. Here are some essential tools to create your healthy kitchen:

--A GOOD VEGETABLE KNIFE

The most useful tool in the kitchen is your vegetable knife. It's worth the cost to get a good quality knife.

I use an NHS Usuba vegetable knife from Japan. It's sharp and easy to control. NHS knives comes from Seiki city, Japan which is famous for its samuri swords.

It's made with high quality carbon steel and durable stainless steel and is professional quality. It stays sharp and you can occasionally sharpen it with a steel rod. A great knife makes prepping easy and fun.

Your knife needs a companion. It's a bamboo cutting board. You can find a good sized board at Home Depot or Target.

---YOUR COOKWARE

The best cookware are glass, heavy gauge stainless steel, cast iron, and cast iron covered with enamel. This cookware is inert and non reactive. I use 5 ply, surgical grade stainless steel cookware. But 5-ply is quite expensive. 3-ply can work well, too.

Many cooks use enamel coated cookware such as Le Creuset. They come in nice colors. But they are heavy, and if you scrub them too much, they lose the enamel coating. They take special care.

Avoid aluminum and Teflon. They give off heavy metal ions, and non-stick coating can flake into your food and give off toxic fumes. Recent research found that toxic Teflon fumes can kill pet birds!

Avoid the cheap enamel pots. They can chip and flake enamel into your food! It has happened to me.

Teflon dangers

Teflon is a DuPont brand name for a non stick surface coating using a synthetic polymer PTFE.

According to The Environmental Working Group (EWG), "Toxic fumes from the Teflon chemical released from pots and pans at high temperatures may kill pet birds and cause people to develop flu-like symptoms (called Teflon Flu, or a scientists describe it, polymer fume fever."

Teflon manufacturers now carry a warning label to avoid high heat. But EWG did their own kitchen tests and found that just 2 to 5 minutes on the stove top with Teflon caused toxic fumes.

The Environmental Working Group recommends cast iron, stainless steel and oven safe glass for baking. I agree!

---YOUR STOVE

A gas stove is best. It's easier to control the heat with a flame rather than electric coils. But there is a caveat here. Anyone with chemical sensitivities may need to switch from a gas stove to an electric stove.

According to Dr. Gerald Ross, MD, president of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, "natural gas is a pollutant chemical that can worsen both classical allergy and chemical sensitivity."

If you have respiratory problems, or are sensitive to odors and chemical smells, you may need to use an electric stove.

If you use a gas stove, be sure to vent it well. I open a kitchen window.

--YOUR WATER

A healthy kitchen needs pure water from a home water filter. The best filters are carbon block filter and reverse osmosis.

I have well water and a carbon block filter. The carbon block filter doesn't catch all contaminants and doesn't remove fluoride. A reverse osmosis would catch more contaminants, but with my hard well water, it would become clogged easily.

Each water situation is different and there are many filters available. more about water filters here.

--MORE TIPS

You can use glass jars to store grains, beans, seeds, nuts and herbs. They look nice lined up in the pantry. Reuse glass jars from sauerkraut, salsa and tahini jars, and you can find glass containers at thrift stores, too.

For a healthy kitchen, minimize plastic for food storage.(plastic is a petroleum product). Pyrex bowls with blue plastic lids work well.

Reduce or avoid plastic wrap. With plastic, the more flexible it is, the more reactive it is, adding unhealthy chemicals into food.

Be cautious with aluminum wrap. It can give off metal ions. I use it when baking occasionally but don't let it touch the food.

Have a few steel colanders in different sizes. You will be washing lots of grains, beans, fruits and vegies!

Your healthy kitchen can be inspiring. Bring in flowers, herbs, baskets of onions, bowls of lemons and apples for color. Let in sunlight and keep counters clear.

You can bring in your favorite art, mirrors and small lamps. Make your kitchen inviting, whether that is white and pure or colorful and earthy.

Most of all make it warm and full of joy!