Retaining Nutrition in Vegetables When Cooking

Retaining Nutrition in Vegetables When Cooking - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. How can you cook vegetables without losing nutritional value? This is a big debate in the nutrition world right now. We have got several people who say that if you cook vegetables at all, you are losing nutritional value, and other people who say, no, cooking the vegetables softens the cell wall, and makes the vitamins and minerals available for the body. The main thing you want to recognize is that having a good mix of raw and cooked vegetables is going to give you the most vitamins and minerals and the most enzymes, which is what you are looking for when you eat vegetables. But, when you are cooking them, think about making them al dente. You want them not mushy, but not really hard. You want them kind of in the middle, a little bit of nice, light crunch to them. That way you will maintain the vitamins and minerals that are in them, not kill off all of the enzymes, and also get all of those great vitamins and minerals available with the softening of the cell walls. So what is the healthiest way to cook your vegetable? In general, the healthiest way is going to be not adding a lot of things to it. So, steaming or boiling. Steaming is great because it retains a lot of the freshness. Boiling will sometimes water log the vegetable. So if you have a steamer, steaming is great. If you are sauteing it, you want to use very little oil. That is going to add a lot of fat to the vegetable, and kind of weigh it down. It will dampen the taste of it.