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Raw, cooked, frozen or canned? How you prepare your produce determines the level of nutritional bang you'll get - Active Nutrition

Men's Fitness, Sept, 2002 by Ben Kallen

If scientists ever came up with a "magic bullet" for staying fit and healthy, it would look a lot like the nutrients contained in everyday fruits and vegetables. These natural chemicals help keep you youthful, strengthen your immune system, and make sure your brain and your nervous and cardiovascular systems run properly. And you need plenty of them if you work out, since exercise can rapidly deplete your body's stores of vital nutrients.

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Of course, some minerals and antioxidants are available in a good multivitamin. But it's always better to get as many of them as possible from food sources. Every vegetable and piece of fruit contains a wide variety of nutrients, some of which may work more effectively as a team than solo in pill form. What's more, colorful produce may harbor a bunch of healthful substances that nutritionists don't even know about yet, but that play a synergistic role in maximizing the nutritional value of foods.

Still, while you do yourself a big favor when you eat a balanced diet with plenty of fruit, vegetables, low-fat protein and whole grains, that's not the whole story. Some potent chemicals may be so locked into a food's structure, they aren't easily absorbed through digestion; others may be partially destroyed through cooking or processing. And, frankly, if you're eating cauliflower or eggplant just because it's good for you, you may as well get the most for your effort. Here MEN'S FITNESS offers 10 rules to help you absorb the greatest possible amount of nutrition from every morsel you eat.

RULE 1| Don't throw out the vitamins with the cooking water. Certain nutrients are water-soluble, including vitamin C, the B vitamins, and some of the phytochemicals that give fruits and vegetables their antioxidant power. Because they dissolve in water, they aren't well-stocked by the body. (That's why some nutritionists recommend divvying up your vitamin C intake into two or three daily doses, since the excess your body doesn't use is excreted along with that glass of iced tea.)

These nutrients also leach out into cooking water, 60 the very worst way to prepare such vegetables as corn (rich in thiamin), red peppers (vitamin C) or eggplant (loaded with anthocyanins, which fight oxidative damage and inflammation) is to boil them. "The longer these chemicals are in water, the more you'll lose--unless you also consume the water," says Luke Howard, Ph.D., a University of Arkansas food scientist who studies the biochemistry of fruits and vegetables.

* "The best way to retain watersoluble nutrients is to steam food in a little water in the microwave," recommends Melanie Polk, M.S., R.D., director of nutrition education for the American Institute for Cancer Research.

* If you do boil your vegetables in water, eat everything in the pot as soup or save the liquid for a sauce, Polk adds.

* When preparing soup, keep the pot covered tightly so nutrients and flavor don't escape with the steam (but be sure to lower the heat so the pot doesn't boil over).

RULE 2| Cook your carotenoids. Carrots, squash, tomatoes, and a variety of orange, green and red vegetables are full of carotenoids, chemicals responsible for a slew of healthful effects. Among other benefits, carotenoids help prevent cancer cells from multiplying, keep eyes healthy, preserve memory and stimulate DNA-repairing enzymes. All these vegetables are good for you when eaten raw; they're crunchy and make fine additions to salads or accompaniments to dip. But if you want to get the most of their nutritional punch, eat them cooked. "Beta-carotene is tightly bound to the protein in a plant, but cooking breaks that binding apart, making the chemical more bioavailable in the human body," says Howard.

When Howard and some colleagues tested carrots, they found that levels of beta-carotene and other antioxidants rose when the carrots were pureed and cooked. The levels shot up even higher when the peels were included.

RULE 3| Get sauced. Lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes and other red foods, has been found in numerous studies to reduce the risk of prostate cancer. (One Harvard study found that men who consumed tomato products at least twice a week lowered by a third their likelihood of developing prostate cancer.) Like other carotenoids, it's best absorbed by the body after the tomatoes have been cooked, and research has found that a little fat makes lycopene even more available. Which means that pasta sauce--whether homemade or from a jar--with a bit of olive oil should be a regular part of your diet.

RULE 4| Heat your spinach. These leafy greens have a lot of calcium, but they're also rich in a chemical called oxilic acid--which can interfere with calcium absorption. Heating nullifies the effect. So while spinach is great in a salad (and very high in antioxidants), eating it lightly steamed will help you score your daily calcium requirement of about 1,000 milligrams.

RULE 5| Don't fear the freezer. A lot of guys think frozen food has less nutrition than fresh, but in fact it has just as much--and sometimes more. That's because what you find in your grocer's freezer was probably "flash-frozen" right after harvesting, while fresh produce takes time to reach the store and may sit around considerably longer before you eat it. What's more, "freezing breaks down the cellular structures, which may release carotenoids and make them more available," notes Wilhelmina Kalt, Ph.D., a food chemist at Canada's national agriculture agency.

Raw, cooked, frozen or canned? How you prepare your produce determines the level of nutritional bang you'll get - Active Nutrition

Men's Fitness, Sept, 2002 by Ben Kallen

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