With so many people turning to health-conscious lifestyles, cookies don't need to be thrown entirely out of your diet. Instead, consider certain of the following tips to help make some healthier cookies for your family.

1. Add Dried Fruit

For recipes that call for chocolate chips or any kind of extra sugar-based additives consider adding in pieces of dried fruit to your cookies. Dried fruits are healthy to consume and contain natural sugars that will still give your cookies a bit of a sweet flavoring. You can choose fruits that will compliment the other flavors in your cookies, or simply experiment with various fruits that you can find at the grocery store. Here are some dried fruits that are commonly used in cookie baking and can be found at your local grocers or farmers market:

Cherries

Raisins

Figs

Prunes

Cranberries

2. Think Whole Grains

Fiber is an important part of a balanced diet, so why not include fibre in your cookies? When baking your cookies from scratch, replace your all-purpose flour with much healthier wheat flour. Even if you replace half of the total amount of flour recommended for a whole wheat flour recipe then you make a healthier cookie. The wheat flour makes your cookies denser than they normally would be with all-purpose flour, thus carrying more nutritional value and fitting into your diet just a little bit better.

Another trick that some bakers use to add nutritional value to cookies is adding oats to the mixture. The oats will give the cookie a crunchy texture and can add additional fiber to your cookies.

3. Substitute your other Ingredients

Think of all the ingredients that you use to make your typical cookie recipe. Now, think of better ingredients that can make your cookies just a little healthier but taste as good as they are normally. The replacement of just a few different ingredients you can make a healthy cookie. Consider some of the following ingredient replacements for your healthy cookie batch:

Replace the oil and butter from your cookie recipe with applesauce

Replace eggs with an egg substitute or even just egg whites

Replace milk chocolate chips with semi-sweet chocolate pieces instead

Replace white sugar with sucanat (sugar cane) or stevia

Remember that if you want to get healthy, you have to think and make healthy food. With these simple tips you can transform what would otherwise be an unhealthy, sugar-filled, fattening cookie into a healthier, lightly sweetened cookie snack.