Nutritional value of the food we eat varies with the method chosen to cook that food. While some foods retain their nutritional value when eaten raw, others need heat to release their goodies. Apart from cooking or not, some ingredients need to be paired with certain other ingredients in order to have a positive effect in the body. Check out the following list of foods that we often eat wrong:
Broccoli is famous for its role in boosting health by preventing cancers like skin and breast cancers. This vegetable from the brassica family can lose its cancer preventing properties when cooked wrongly by frying or boiling. The best cooking method that conserves the nutritional value of broccoli is steaming. In case you choose boiling broccoli, you can prepare it to be spicy as pairing broccoli with spices increases its cancer fighting ability.
The benefit of potatoes lies in your choice of potatoes. The most nutritious kinds of potatoes are the purple ones. Benefits of purple potatoes over white ones are that they contain higher amounts of polyphenols; they lower blood pressure and they reduce cancer risks. Hence, when you want to devour your potatoes mashed, baked or fried, get those purple potatoes and prepare your health packed meal.
Mustard comes in various fancy salad dressings but the best benefits of mustard lie in the simple yellow mustard. Yellow mustard has this color due to the availability of curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric. Curcumin gives mustard health benefits like reduction of inflammation and reduction of risks for some cancers.
Carotenoids are beneficial ingredients of carrots that become more available for our body to use when carrots are cooked rather than eaten raw. Even though boiling carrots increases their nutritional value, chopping this vegetable makes it lose a lot of its nutrients. Small pieces of carrot would have a larger surface area for the nutrients to escape.
Got cardiovascular trouble? Garlic can help you by hindering clotting and allowing free flow of blood in vessels. You need to allow the release of allicin enzyme from garlic to get its benefits. Allicin can be released when you crush your cloves and let them rest for a minimum of ten minutes before eating.
3. Pears and Apples
Don’t rush eating pears or apples once you get them. Leaving these delicious fruits to ripen allows their chlorophyll to breakdown producing marvelous active antioxidants. Antioxidants fight free radicals in the body and so help in prevention of different cancers.
Tea on its own has cardiovascular benefits but if you add milk to the mix, you reduce the beneficial value of tea. Green tea is better than black tea in terms of health benefits and you can add vitamin C containing juice to the tea to increase the bioavailability of green tea’s nutrients. Take care that green tea contains caffeine so don’t reach for it if you are looking for a decaf beverage.
1. Salad Dressing
If you are cautious about your weight, you might be tempted to go for a fat free dressing for your salad. Nonetheless, fat containing salad dressings are better for your health for two advantages. First, the fat content will make you feel full and so you will eat less carbohydrate rich food. Second of all, the fats will boost the benefits of your salad ingredients as they will help in the absorption of nutrients like zeaxanthin, lypopene and beta-carotene.
Making these simple changes in the way you eat food will provide you with benefits you will not regret. Always look for the health cautious way of food preparation.