Don't Kill Your Veggies!
Download PDFBe aware of what you’re cooking with to avoid lowering the nutrient content of your vegetables.
Do you actually know how different types of cooking effects your foods? Microwaves cook foods using waves of energy, similar to radio waves, but a smaller length. Heat is created by increasing the vibration in molecules that results in a buildup in thermal energy, aka heat. Ovens cook foods by transferring heat within a small space, and stoves user burners to heat foods.
However, foods that are heat-sensitive need to be considered when microwaving, as well as other methods of heating. This includes ovens, and stoves! Particularly, vegetables tend to be very sensitive to heat and how they are cooked. Here are some tips to make sure you don’t kill the nutrients in your vegetables:
- Boiling: this might be one of the worst way to cook vegetables. Nutrients leach out of foods when cooking them in water. Don’t boil vegetables.
- Raw: this is a safe way to eat vegetables, however it does not mean they are the most nutrient-rich when consumed this way.
- Steaming: This is one of the better ways to cook foods because steaming allows you to cook vegetables while still retaining most of their valuable nutrients.
- Cooking: Research states that cooking tomatoes is the best way to obtain lycopene benefits.
So what is the best way to cook? All vegetables have different properties and nutritional breakdowns. Therefore, the best way to cook vegetables= the methods that cooks them the fastest, and in the shortest amount of time.
Bottom line: The important this is to keep eating them, as most individual are not eating enough vegetables! So eat those veggies Magna!
