Everyone knows that vegetables are good for you. To gain full nutritional benefits from vegetables it is important that they are eaten when they are as fresh as possible. Vitamin content is highest in raw vegetables or those that are cooked so as to preserve their vitamins.
Buying vegetables
The best way to have fresh vegetables is to grow your own to pick fresh each day. If you buy vegetables from a greengrocer or supermarket, it is important to know how to choose the freshest vegetables available and how to store them to keep them fresh. Here are Rosemary’s tips for choosing the freshest vegetables:
Buy from a greengrocer or supermarket with a good turn over.
Select vegetables which look, feel and smell fresh. If you can bend a carrot it will have lost most of its goodness. Spinach or other greens which are wilted have lost most of their water soluble vitamins B and C.
Buy small amounts often (so they keep fresh) and vary the way you serve them.
Best storage
To ensure freshness vegetables should be stored in the refrigerator well wrapped in a plastic bag. There are some exceptions:
Capsicum, cucumber and eggplant store best unwrapped but in the fridge as they sweat in plastic and can develop rots.
Mushrooms should be stored in paper bags and not plastic.
Tomatoes should not be refrigerated (cold conditions spoil the fruit’s flavour).
Cooking vegetables
Most vegetables have maximum vitamins when they’re raw so include raw vegetables such as a salad in your daily diet. When vegetables are cooked they lose vitamins, particularly folate.
In some instances nutritional benefits may be enhanced by cooking:
Carrots provide more beta carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A) when they are cooked. However as raw carrots contain so much beta carotene just one carrot will provide more than a whole day’s supply.
The starch in potatoes needs to be cooked to be digestible.
To preserve as much goodness as possible in cooked vegetables Rosemary recommends that they should be steamed (around 20% of vitamins are lost in the steaming process), stir fried, baked (for example potatoes or pumpkin) or best of all cooked in a microwave. When vegetables are boiled they lose about half of their vitamins into the cooking water. When cooked in a microwave or by stir frying, vegetables retain most of their nutritional value as long as they are not overcooked.
Further information
For more of Rosemary Stanton’s advice on food and nutrition consult:
Rosemary Stanton’s Complete Book of Food and Nutrition (Simon & Schuster, revised edition, 1995, rrp $29.95); or
The Good Gut Cookbook by Rosemary Stanton, (HarperCollins Publishers, revised edition, 1998, rrp $19.95).
