Soul food recipes continue to adapt to healthier consumer lifestyles.  With  the past reputation of high calories, salt and fat content, this tasty southern cuisine is taking on a consumer friendlier change. Now you'll  find better cooking techniques, healthy ingredients and  natural herbs and seasonings. To the delight of health professionals and medical experts,  soul food cooking is lighter in calories, fat and salt than  traditional recipes of the past.

Thanks to creative cooks, now a whole new industry continues to develop.  Healthy soul food is now a fast growing industry with no end in sight.  Restaurants are reworking their menus,  manufacturers are developing new food products with less sodium, fat and calories. And book publishers are scrambling to publish books with health themes to meet the growing demand by consumers.

A new revolution is taking place with soul food recipes and  the public is loving it. The biggest hurdle to these new changes have been keeping the recipes tasty, satisfying and flavorful. But with new cooking techniques, natural seasonings  and herbs we've turned the corner and raised the bar and gave consumers the best of both world's. "But we continue to push forward and not rest on our laurels," admits one free soul food recipes publisher.

Getting traditional southern food lover’s to adapt to lighter and healthier eating proved a huge challenge in the early days. People never imagined collard greens, black eye peas and pinto beans could taste good without fatback or ham hocks swimming in them.  But to the surprise of many smoked turkey proved an excellent replacement, that provided that smoky robust flavor. And the best part of having the flavor is not having the fat content along with it. A win - win situation for everyone.

Here's examples of how soul food recipes  are getting healthier for consumers.
Instead of using fat back and ham hocks to flavor vegetables such as collard greens, black eyed peas or cabbage, smoked turkey is used.  By doing this over 50% less fat is consumed while still giving food the smoky robust flavor people love so much.

Instead of boiling collard greens or cabbage in large amounts of water for 1 to 2 hours and  destroying nutrients and vitamins in the process.  More cooks are stir frying these veggies. Stir frying has proven to save over 50% of food nutrients and vitamins. Instead of deep fat frying in fat. More meats are baked, roasted or pan fried. Thus, less fat content is absorbed in the meats. In addition,  with roasting and baking much of the fat content is cooked out of the meats.