Online recipe database is a pretty good source for healthy recipes. It's convenient to use by filtering with various criteria.
However, there are no food blogs, websites, search engines, or databases that can provide the best healthy recipes. As a result, we have to manually find the best recipes.
Here we use "Spoonacular" to search for the best healthy recipes because it's probably with the best information (including both nutrition and cost information) in the market.
A high quality healthy recipe should follow the criteria:
Low sodium: High sodium can cause high blood pressure, various cardiovascular diseases, and kidney damage. Many popular food blogs' or websites' recipes are usually with high sodium. For lunch or dinner, the sodium per serving should be below 690g (DV%: 30%).
Low sugar: High sugar can cause obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression and other mental health issues. Many popular food blogs' or websites' recipes are usually with high sugar. For lunch or dinner, the sugar per serving should be below 15g (DV%: 30%).
Low saturated fat: High saturated fat can cause various cardiovascular diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline and dementia in later life. Many popular food blogs' or websites' recipes are usually with high saturated fat. For lunch or dinner, the saturated fat per serving should be below 6g (DV%: 30%).
For breakfast, the DV% should be reduced to 20%; for snacks, the DV% should be reduced to 10%.
Balanced nutrition.
Quick and easy to prepare: should be within 30 minutes.
Delicious tasting.
Less expensive.
If you want to know about %DV, you may check FDA website:
By following the above stringent criteria, we have listed all the best healthy recipes from "Spoonacular" database.
Breakfast recipes:
Lunch and dinner recipes: