Maximizing Your Produce's Nutrients
Are you interested in learning how to get the most flavor and nutrition out of the fruits and vegetables you already eat? See below for 12 terrific tips on how to do so, from the book, “Eating on the Wild Side” by Jo Robinson.
Tearing Romaine and Iceberg lettuce the day before you eat it quadruples its antioxidant content.
The healing properties of garlic can be maximized by slicing, chopping, mashing, or pressing it raw and then letting it rest for a full 10 minutes before cooking.
The yellowest corn in the store has 35 times more beta-carotene than white corn.
Cooking potatoes and then chilling them for about 24 hours before you eat them (even if you reheat them) turns a high-glycemic vegetable into a low- or moderate-glycemic vegetable.
Carrots are more nutritious cooked than raw. When cooked whole, they have 25 percent more falcarinol, a cancer-fighting compound, than carrots that have been sectioned before cooking.
Beet greens are more nutritious than the beets themselves.
The smaller the tomato, the more nutrients it contains. Deep red tomatoes have more antioxidants than yellow, gold, or green tomatoes.
The most nutritious tomatoes in the supermarket are not in the produce aisles- they are in the canned goods section! Processed tomatoes, whether canned or cooked into a paste or sauce, are the richest known source of lycopene. They also have the most flavor. Make sure they are in a BPA free container.
Storing broccoli wrapped in a plastic bag with tiny pin pricks in it will give you up to 125 percent more antioxidants than if you had stored the broccoli loosely wrapped or in a tightly sealed bag.
Canned or jarred artichokes are just as nutritious as fresh.
Thawing frozen berries in the microwave preserves twice as many antioxidants and more vitamin C than thawing them on the counter or inside your refrigerator.
Ounce per ounce, there is more fiber in raspberries than bran cereals.
Roxy Turner
BHC Nutrition Coach