Recipe: How to make muffin mixes more nutritious

HOW TO MAKE MUFFIN MIXES MORE NUTRITIOUS

Some muffin mixes only need you to add water. For these, the only adjustment you can make is to add extra fruit (raisins, frozen berries or peaches, fresh chopped pear or apple), grated carrots, chopped nuts or other nutrient-rich food. This is easy, since many of these don't require any prep work.

Other muffin mixes may call for you to add milk and oil. Here, you can minimize saturated fat and avoid further trans fat by using fat-free milk and a healthy oil like canola oil. You could also replace some or all of the oil with unsweetened applesauce.

However, by using a mix, you miss the opportunity for other steps that can make a muffin more nutritious, like making some or all of the flour whole wheat, keeping added sugar moderate and limiting salt. In some recipe test comparisons it took five minutes more to make muffins from scratch instead of a mix.

Of course, no matter how you start the muffins, you also make them healthier by cooking them in traditional size muffin pans instead of the giant muffin tins that produce muffins the size of small cakes, which makes even nutrient-rich muffins high-calorie.

Source: Karen Collins, MS, RD, CDN, the American Institute for Cancer Research