Handle vegetables well to get all their benefits

Did you know that nearly each food preparation procedure, be it washing, cutting, cooking or peeling reduces the amount of nutrients in it?

When you cook your foods, especially vegetables, under high temperatures or expose them to light it causes great nutrient loss.

Nutrients are also washed out of foods by fluids introduced while cooking. When you boil foods like the traditional vegetables, a habit practised by many, most water-soluble vitamins migrate to the boiling water.

You can still benefit from these nutrients as long as you consume everything including the water. However, most people will drain the water and only eat the vegetables.

This method of cooking will not only destroy essential vitamins and minerals but will also see the remaining nutrients poured out with the drained fluids.

The only nutrient you will be left with after spending so much to buy and prepare the vegetables is fibre. Almost all foods have natural fluids in them and do not need additional water to cook. When you boil your traditional vegetables, what colour does the water turn to? Green.

When you are cooking food that has carrots, the water turns orange.

The nutrients and colour of the foods dissolve in the water and when you lose the colour, you lose vitamins and other nutritional values.

When you lose the natural taste of the vegetable you’ve lost minerals. So when a vegetable is cooked until it is brown in colour, it is no longer a vegetable.

It is a common practice among Kenyans to mix several vegetables and more so when preparing the bitter traditional vegetables.

Some vegetables like spinach and amaranth have a naturally occurring chemical called Oxalic acid which has the potential to bind with calcium, magnesium, zinc and copper in our intestines to form oxalates, insoluble salts which cannot be absorbed in our bodies. This makes these essential nutrients unavailable to our bodies.

It is better to cook each vegetable separately.

For root tubers such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, arrow roots, carrots and cassava, most of their nutrients, vitamins and minerals are just below the skin.

Peeling these foods past the thin layer under the skin leads to a loss of the main vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. So eat your root foods unpeeled or if you have to peel, do so very closely to the skin.

The peels we throw away subconsciously are exactly what we need to fight diseases.

So take that trip to the market and buy fresh foods. Avoid cutting and peeling too much, cook your vegetables under low heat and eat them while still green.