Microwave pizza. Boxed dinners. A drawer full of takeout menus. This isn't your grandma's kitchen.

When feeding her family, chances are your grandmother relied on simple, fresh ingredients and creativity. Most didn't have access to the array of foods we take for granted. Today, food is fast and plentiful, and that has its advantages, but it also contributes to a number of health problems.

Pre-packaged foods and restaurant meals contain higher levels of sodium, saturated fat, sugar, and artificial ingredients, leading to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes--not to mention indigestion, says Korey DiRoma, naturopathic doctor with the Center for Integrative Health and Healing in Delmar and Bennington, Vt.

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Here's some tips for eating more like your grandma:

Eat in: "The best thing to do is cook your own food," says DiRoma. Purchase whole foods and fresh vegetables at farmers' markets and food co-ops, and cook it up at home. Stick to simple recipes, heavy on the grains and vegetables.

Find new (old) recipes: Sit down with your family and ask about what they used to eat. If you remember a dish you particularly liked, get the recipe. "Sharing recipes helps people feel connected with past. It helps people feel rooted and I believe it has health benefits as well," says Windmueller.

Teach the tradition: Family meals are a time for reconnecting and learning, not just at the table, but in the kitchen. Including children in the shopping and cooking, "teaches them the value of cooking and eating their own food, rather than popping something in the microwave, or opening a package, or going to a fast food restaurant and getting their food," says DiRoma. It also ensures that old family dishes live on.

Your grandmothers had three things going for them when it came to preparing healthy meals: fresh ingredients, slow cooking, and less money--that's right, less money.

Poverty forced our grandmothers to be resourceful, says Nan Windmueller, a nutritionist in private practice in Albany. American prosperity transformed diets, making them fattier and more artificial. Today's cooks focus on meat, animal products, and heavily processed convenience foods, but past generations had to make do with less, building cheap meals around vegetables and starches.

Meat, if they had it, was used more as a "flavoring agent," Windmueller says, for soups and other filling one-dish meals like rice, polenta, couscous, and pasta. "We rely too heavily on processed foods and animal protein. We're the only mammals that continue to consume dairy after we are weaned, and that speaks volumes," says Windmueller. "Nature intended us to use the animal protein as a condiment."

"The ideal diet would be a whole foods diet, where people are eating lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, protein sources mostly from plants, such as nuts and beans, legumes, and other lean protein sources from organic, free-range chickens, turkeys, eggs, and then also cold-water fish, salmon, cod essential things for omega 3's, which are naturally anti-inflammatory," says DiRoma.

Food quality has also gone downhill. "I think what has happened in the last 50 or 60 years is what we call the industrialization of food," says DiRoma. To keep pace with the increasing demand for crops, many farmers are working depleted soil. Livestock eat grain, not grass, and farmers use chemicals to boost production. As a consequence, today's food contains more chemicals and less nutrients, says DiRoma.

Unfortunately, prosperity and industrialization interrupted not just the transmission of these older ways of cooking, but also the way we look at eating. Cooking and eating have taken a backseat to work and social obligations, and more people are cramming meals in while they drive or watch TV.

"I think more people are eating just to eat," says DiRoma. The slow foods movement emphasizes taking the time to prepare good meals and sit down and enjoy them--an essential element of a healthy diet. "Eating on the run, or standing, or driving is not necessarily good for our health because the part of our system that does digestion is the slower part of our system, and so when we are eating in a stressful environment, it actually hinders our ability to digest food," says DiRoma. Indigestion, acid reflux, and irritable bowel syndrome usually occur when people don't take the time to eat properly, says DiRoma.

Molly Belmont is a freelance writer from Albany.