Keeping Vitamin Values Intact
Keeping Vitamin Values Intact
Many vitamins are readily destroyed or lost when foods are preserved, stored, and cooked. With the current emphasis on highly refined and precooked convenience foods and the great distances fresh foods must travel before they reach the consumer’s table, the modern American diet may shortchange some people.
Much of the following advice on how to get the most vitamins for your food dollar is derived from research cited in Nutritional Evaluation of Food Processing.
- Eat whole grain rather than refined breads and cereals and brown rice instead of white. Enriched breads, pasta, cereals, and rice are second best. Parboiled or converted rice has more vitamins than polished rice.
- Use fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables instead of canned ones. During canning, the amount of many vitamins is reduced by half or more, and further losses occur during storage of the canned goods. Freezing, followed by storage and cooking, also reduces the vitamin content, but much less than does canning. Boil-in-the-bag frozen foods are preferred for their vitamin content. Don’t thaw frozen vegetables before cooking.
- Storage of fresh foods in your refrigerator for one or more days leads to considerable vitamin loss. For those who cannot shop often, frozen fruits and vegetables may be as nutritious as the fresh. Foods that are frozen are picked ripe and processed rapidly, whereas days or weeks may elapse before fresh produce is consumed.
- Fruits and vegetables ripened on the plant (except for pineapples) and in the sun have considerably more vitamin C than those picked green or grown in shade. To preserve vitamin C, fruit should be chilled immediately after being picked and kept cold and uncut until eaten. Most of the vitamin C in fruit is in and just under the skin, so paring fruit results in a considerable loss.
- Avoid prolonged soaking of fresh vegetables, or you’ll wash the B vitamins and vitamin C down the drain.
- Prepare salads just before they are to be eaten. Delay the cutting up and preparation of foods until shortly before they are to be cooked and eaten.
- Keep all fresh, cut, and cooked foods well wrapped in the refrigerator.
- In cooking vegetables, pressure cooking is least detrimental to vitamins. Steaming is second best. If boiling a vegetable, use as little water as possible – just enough so that nearly all is reabsorbed by the time the vegetable is done. Or use the cooking water, which will be rich in vitamins, in your recipe or to make a soup or stew.
- Toasting bread destroys much of one of the B vitamins, thiamine. Bread crust has less thiamine than the soft crumb.
- Potatoes baked in the skin retain most of their nutrients. Boiling potatoes in their skins is better than paring and cutting them up. In general, the more a vegetable is cut up before cooking, the greater the vitamin loss.
- Glass, stain Jess steel, aluminum, enamel, and similar pots and pans do not affect nutrient content. But cooking in iron pots, an advantage to those who need extra iron in their diets, can destroy some of the vitamin C. So can unlined copper, brass, and monel (a nickel alloy). Copper also destroys folic acid and vitamin E.
- Don’t cook vegetables with baking soda; it destroys thiamine and vitamin C.
- Use the vitamin-rich syrup in canned fruits to make your own gelatin dessert. Make gravy from the defatted juices that drain from meats during thawing and cooking.
- Riboflavin and vitamins A and D are readily decomposed by light. Keep milk and breads in opaque containers.
- Buy milk and margarine that are fortified with vitamin A. Milk should also contain vitamin D.