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The best cooks write down and store all their recipes and share them with friends and family members. They get recipes from books, passed down from parents, from friends and from the Internet, and they enjoy preparing delicious, healthy meals on a regular basis.

But you don’t have to be an expert cook to keep a file of your favorite recipes and enjoy healthy meals. Begin by writing down a list of your favorite foods, whether you know how to cook them or not. If you know what ingredients the recipe takes, write that down to. If not, look it up online and begin building your collection of recipes.

You can write recipes down on notecards, and then store those notecards in an easily accessible, durable box that fits in your cupboards. As an extra tip, keep a pen inside the box so you can add or delete items from the notecards.

Now that you have a file of your favorite recipes, it is time to start cooking. The best recipes are those that have personal touches, so as you cook, write down any extra ingredients you include. If you think of healthier versions to the recipe, write that down too!

As more and more products fill the shelves of our grocery stores, it gets increasingly complicated to choose healthy foods. We know we want to avoid harmful additives, foods high in sugar and salt, and snacks that have no nutritious value, but sometimes all of those elements are very hard to avoid.

What makes it even more difficult is when food companies claim their products are made from “natural” ingredients, when instead the foods undergo such dramatic processing and chemical alteration that they don’t contain the natural nutrients of the original food at all. Unfortunately, the FDA doesn’t strictly regulate what companies call “natural.” As long as the food was somehow derived from plant or animal products, it can be called natural, no matter what kind of chemical changes it was subjected to.

Organic foods are regulated carefully by the FDA. Unlike natural foods, they are never grown with pesticides or genetically-modified properties. To label a product “organic,” it has to be grown without pesticides or modification. For meats, eggs or milk to be organic, the animals must eat healthy organic diets and be given no antibiotics or growth hormones.

Organic shoppers know they are getting some of the healthiest foods available. However, they also know the food was grown in a way that didn’t leave harmful pesticides or herbicides in the soil or water, and that the animals most likely lived healthy, cruelty-free lives. Buying organic foods is an important first step in protecting the health of your family and supporting an environmentally friendly lifestyle.