"If there is a secret to eating well, it is to cook and bake with real ingredients," says Michaud. Processed food loaded with preservatives has become ubiquitous. "With these engineered flavours, our palates have become numb to authentic taste and I have often witnessed people liking a chemically-flavoured pastry more than one made with real ingredients. We forget what real food is supposed to taste like."
Michaud shares three ways to make desserts healthier and tastier.
GI is a measure of how quickly the level of glucose in your blood rises after eating a particular food. Many nutritionists suggest looking for low GI food to eat healthier. Michaud thinks this also applies to desserts. He believes that keeping GI low is a question of balancing the ingredients.
"You can have something fat and sweet but it needs to be offset by something else: for example, if you have a chocolate pudding you can combine it with a sorbet which will lower the overall GI content," he says. Another strategy is to use natural sugars, which have lower GI. Michaud has researched widely and found that agave nectar has a lower GI than a fresh apple. He adds: "Palm sugar has a low GI of 30, and has a rounder taste than brown sugar with pleasant caramel notes."
