How you Eat, Cook and Prepare your food DOES matter!
WHAT you eat matters, but how you EAT it ,and how you COOK & PREPARE your food also matters.
To help you separate fact from fiction and only implement what will actually benefit you, here’s a guide to food preparation, cooking, and combining tips that have real merit, as well as a few things you might be doing that decrease your nutrient absorption.
Know How to Store Your Produce: Many fruits and vegetables start losing nutrients not long after they’ve been harvested. Eating fresh produce from your garden or buying locally will keep the most nutrients intact, but even so, you can’t eat everything right away. Heat, light, and oxygen can cause produce to degrade, but the trickiest part is that different fruits and veggies have different ideal storage conditions. Here are a few simple guidelines:
Most Vegetables: Store in perforated bags in one of the produce drawers in your refrigerator. Keep away from fruit because fruits release ethylene gas that will speed up ripening.
Hard Skinned Vegetables, Tomatoes, and Potatoes: Vegetables with a protective skin like onions, garlic, potatoes (including sweet), winter squash, and pumpkins should be stored at room temperature out of direct sunlight. Tomatoes can sit at room temperature in sunlight to finish ripening.
Soft Fruits and Apples: Berries, grapes, cherries, and apricots should be stored in perforated bags in the produce drawer away from vegetables. Apples that need to be stored longer than a week should also be refrigerated.
Citrus and Tropical Fruits: Many tropical fruits like mangoes, bananas, pineapples, papayas, and pomegranates as well as melons and citrus store best at room temperature and should be eaten as soon as they are ripe.
Stone Fruits, Kiwi, and Avocados: Let them ripen at room temperature and then refrigerate to preserve nutrients.
Don’t Count Out Frozen Produce: To get the most nutrient-rich frozen produce, freeze it yourself immediately after harvesting or as soon as it’s properly ripe. Or, look for brands that freeze their produce straight from the farm.
Chop and “Rest” Your Garlic Before Cooking: Garlic could well be considered a superfood because it contains powerful compounds that can reduce your risk of cancer and other diseases. There’s a specific enzyme called alliinase that garlic releases to speed the formation of a compound called allicin. So far in studies, allicin appears to be the main anti-cancer compound in garlic and responsible for many other health benefits as well. However, heating garlic has been shown to inhibit the formation of allicin unless the garlic has first been chopped or crushed and allowed to stand for 10 minutes before cooking it. So unless you want to eat all your garlic raw, chop and rest it before heating it to make sure you’re getting the most out of its disease- fighting potential.
Cut Your Fruits and Veggies at Home: When you cut into fresh produce, you slice through cell walls and break them down. This can actually free up nutrients that were held in the plant’s cells. Besides making nutrients more available, chopping certain produce raises its antioxidant capacity. Buy your whole fruits and vegetables and chop them right before cooking or eating.
Cooking Secrets for Boosting Nutrient Absorption:
Cook Carrots and Keep Them Whole: Of course, carrots are good for you no matter how you eat them, but studies have shown that your body can absorb significantly higher amounts of carotenoids from cooked carrots rather than raw. Adding olive oil in while cooking increased this amount even more. Polyacetylenes were retained better in carrots that were cooked whole rather than being diced or quartered. With this in mind, an easy way to get the most nutrients out of carrots is to roast them whole.
Cook Tomatoes for Better Nutrient Uptake: Tomatoes contain a carotenoid called lycopene that is a powerful antioxidant found to decrease your risk of heart disease and cancer. Studies have consistently shown that cooking tomatoes significantly increases their lycopene content as compared to eating them raw. One study found that cooking tomatoes at a low heat of 190°F for 15 or 30 minutes showed an increase of lycopene by 171%.
Cook in Cast Iron to Boost Iron Content of Food: Keep in mind that the amounts of iron you gain will be less than you would get from a supplement. Still, cooking something like apples in an iron skillet can boost their iron content, and if you have low iron, every little bit counts.
Chop Broccoli & Other Cruciferous Veggies BEFORE Cooking:Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage and other cruciferous vegetables are quite possibly nature’s most powerful cancer-fighting foods of all. It is crucial to chop, crush, or blend cruciferous vegetables before cooking (or to chew them well if eating raw) if you want to properly unleash their cancer-fighting power. That’s because the plant cell’s walls must be broken apart for the enzyme myrosinase to convert glucosinolates to isothiocyanates (ITCs) – in short, this is the cancer-fighting “magic” in cruciferous vegetables. Once these ITCs are formed, they will then remain stable through the cooking process.
Stir-Fry Red Peppers or Eat Them Raw: Eating red peppers raw is a good choice because heat will cause fruits and vegetables to lose a lot of their vitamin C content. However, if you do want to cook them, the best option for getting the most nutrients it to stir-fry your peppers. If stir-frying isn’t your preferred method of cooking, try another dry heat option like lightly roasting them to keep as many nutrients intact as possible.
Leave High Vitamin C Fruits (and Veggies) Uncooked: Many fruits like citrus, blueberries, kiwi, mangoes, cantaloupe, strawberries, pineapple, and cranberries are high in vitamin C. Some leafy vegetables and bell peppers also pack in a good amount. Vitamin C is one of the nutrients that is consistently lost when food is cooked or heated. It doesn’t disappear completely, but levels can drop significantly. To make sure you’re getting enough of this powerful nutrient, eat a lot of your fruit raw and mix in some raw vegetables like kale.
Food Combinations for Better Nutrient Absorption:
Pair Vitamin C with Iron-Rich, Plant-Based Foods: To boost your iron absorption, try using a citrus dressing on leafy greens, adding mandarin oranges or strawberries to a salad, or eating dried mango with nuts and seeds.
Pair Avocados with Leafy Greens and Tomatoes: The healthy fats in avocados has been shown to improve the absorption of fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K). This makes them good to pair with many vegetables, but they make an especially good match for leafy greens and tomatoes. This is great news for guacamole lovers! Just make sure you’ve got tomato in your guacamole, and you’re good to go.
Use Lots of Herbs and Spices on High Fat Meals: In a study done by Penn State University, researchers used a blend of antioxidant-rich spices like turmeric, cloves, black pepper, and rosemary to evaluate its effects on a high-fat meal. The results showed that using about two tablespoons of the spice mix to season the meal reduced triglyceride response by about 30%. It also increased antioxidant activity in the bloodstream by 13%.
Pair Vitamin D with Calcium-Rich Foods: There are many foods that contain a rich source of calcium, such as beans, lentils, almonds, spinach, and kale. So why are many people deficient in calcium if it’s found in so many foods? The biggest answer seems to be that even when you’re eating good sources of calcium, it doesn’t get absorbed into your intestines without the presence of vitamin D. It may sound strange, but one of the best pairings for calcium-rich foods is sunlight! Of course, in the winter months, you may want to opt for a natural vitamin D supplement to keep your body absorbing calcium until sunny days return.
Combine Nuts and Fruits: Research indicates that fruits high in vitamin C make a great partner for nuts that are high in vitamin E. Both of these vitamins are powerful anti-aging antioxidants that are essential for skin health, and they appear to work better together. Pairing fruits like citrus, strawberries, cherries, mango, and blueberries with seeds and nuts like almonds or sunflower seeds can help your body get the most out of both nutrients.
Add Lemon or Another Citrus to Green Tea: researchers have found that simply adding a citrus juice to your green tea can increase the absorption rate of catechins significantly. ECGC availability increased by 50-76% just with the addition of citrus. The juices of orange, lemon, grapefruit, and lime were all analyzed in the study and found effective, so add a splash of any of these to your next green tea drink!
Avoid these Practices that can Impair Nutrient Absorption:
Don’t Drink Tea or Coffee with a Meal: Studies have found that drinking polyphenol-rich coffee or tea at the same time as consuming a meal with nonheme iron prevents a lot of that iron from being absorbed. The percentage of iron blocked was from 64-94% for black tea and about 39% for coffee. Of course, if you’re eating a meal with not much iron in it, coffee and tea may have little effect on nutrient absorption. But if you rely mainly on plant sources for your daily iron intake, it’s much better to drink your coffee or tea in between meals rather than while eating or immediately following a meal.
Avoid Over-consuming Alcohol: Alcohol is very much a part of the relaxation and social aspects of many cultures, but drinking too much of it can actually impair the ability of your body to absorb nutrients from food. One of the reasons for this is that alcohol can decrease the secretion of digestive enzymes that normally help your body to break down and digest food. Go easy on the alcohol to keep getting the most out of what you eat.
Avoid Becoming Dehydrated: Besides being a vital nutrient we can’t live without, water also has a big impact on your digestive system and how well it can absorb nutrients from food. Being well hydrated helps to keep food moving through your intestines and helps it get broken down.
Chew, Chew Slowly: Slowing down and chewing your food is key to breaking down food and activating enzymes in the mouth that help to properly digest nutrients. You don’t need to count your chews, of course. The ideal is to just chew until your food has a mushy consistency inside your mouth. An additional bonus is that in doing so, you typically can enjoy the taste of the foods and the experience in eating more!
By using these proven tactics, you can start getting more nutrients out of your food with just a few subtle changes. Paying attention to how you prepare and cook certain foods, and what you combine them with, can have a big impact on your health.
If you’re already on the path to healthy eating and want to get even more out of your food, start incorporating some of these outlined strategies to significantly boost the nutrients your body is absorbing!
Here’s to living a longer and healthier life!