Cooking at home can improve your diet, especially if you limit the amount of salt and oils you cook with and use a lot of fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Here are more tips:

• Read the nutritional labels on packaged foods. They tell you how many calories are in each serving, how many servings are in each container, and how much of some important vitamins and minerals are in the food. Nutritional labels also tell you how much of the less healthy stuff like fat, sodium (salt), and sugar is in your food.

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• The nutritional label includes something called the Percent Daily Value (%DV), which tells you how much of the daily total amount of that nutrient is in the food. So if your morning cereal’s %DV for fiber is 14%, you’d have to get the other 86% of fiber that day from other foods.

• What about fresh fruits and vegetables? They don’t usually come with labels, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a handy chart you can use to figure out the amount of vitamins, minerals, sugar, calories, etc.:
fda.gov/food/labelingnutrition

• In general, cook with olive oil instead of corn oil, margarine, or butter, and steam vegetables instead of frying.

• For healthy cooking ideas, try these sites, where you can find many recipes for free:
wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes
eatinghealthy.com
realsimple.com