How to cook fresh vegetables and fruits to preserve their flavor: useful tips from a nutritionist

Fresh fruits, vegetables, and berries are healthy because they contain vitamins, biologically active compounds, and minerals. But if you don't want to nibble on raw carrots or broccoli, what can you do? This means that proper heat treatment of vegetables can preserve the maximum amount of nutrients in the dish. Nutritionist Olha Bezuhla shared her tips on how to do this on her Instagram page.

Berries and fruits can be consumed fresh and raw. But when it comes to vegetables, what is the best way to cook them? Boil, steam, bake, stew, freeze, dry, or salt? How do you cook vegetables to get the most out of them?

The best way to choose is to determine what exactly we want to get from the final dish. Because any type of cooking will reduce the benefits of one component, while revealing the benefits of another.

For example, spinach is a storehouse of nutrients, but in the process of any type of cooking and storage in the refrigerator, it practically loses vitamin C. However, the cooking process helps to destroy phytic acid, which allows for better absorption of calcium, iron, and magnesium.

There is another important advantage of heat treatment of food: it helps to destroy pesticide residues on vegetables.

How to cook vegetables properly to make them healthy? You may think that raw food is the healthiest, but this is not entirely true. According to experts, the carotenoids contained in carrots, tomatoes, and peppers are best absorbed in the body if these vegetables are heat-treated with a little fat.

The example of carrots shows that cooked carrots contain 35% more antioxidants than raw carrots. Also, the color of cooked carrots practically does not change, which indicates its high vitamin A content. To meet the need for vitamin A, it is enough to eat just 30 grams of boiled carrots per day.

It is also worth knowing that vitamin A does not like exposure to ultraviolet light and oxygen, but is able to withstand heat treatment up to 120 degrees Celsius. Drying in the open sun can destroy carotene, especially in chopped foods, so it is better to use other storage methods. If you want to preserve the biological structure of vitamin A, it is better to use a preservation method without access to oxygen and light.

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