Food Preparation Tips

Tips for preparing and cooking of food in a nutrient friendly way

Having gone to the trouble, and sometimes extra expense, to select a variety of foods which can deliver your full requirement for nutrients the last thing we want to happen is to lose their goodness during the process of preparing and cooking the food.

Here are some simple reminders to help you get the best from your diet.

Where possible eat the whole food

• Eat the skins of fruit like apples, pears, peaches and plums. A disproportionately large amount of the goodness is usually stored in the skins or in the fruit’s flesh just underneath the skins. Obviously you don’t need to try this with bananas, oranges and melons.
• When preparing vegetable such as tomatoes, carrots, parsnips and cauliflower it is better to wash or scrub them clean before cooking rather than peel them. Just like fruit, the part of the vegetable nearest the surface is often the most nutritious.

Note: if the food was not produced organically it is important to give it a good wash, not just a light rinse. The chemical sprays and treatments used to suppress pest attack are often engineered to be “rain proof”.

• Food does not have to be perfectly shaped or proportioned to be nutritious. However, steer clear of fruit and vegetables which show signs of damage or blemishes as they may have begun to degrade.
• As soon as the fruit or vegetable is cut it will start to lose nutrients from that newly exposed surface. So don’t chop them up a long time in advance of when they are needed. And when you do cut them into pieces make sure they are as chunky as possible – this will create a smaller total surface area from which losses will occur.

Excessive heat and water will rob your food of vitamins and useful enzymes

• Steam your vegetables. This will help them to hold on to more vitamins than boiling or roasting them.
• If you do have to boil them then use as little water as you can get away with, heat the water before adding the vegetables and keep them in there for as short a time as possible. They will be better for you and tastier than vegetables which have been over-cooked and are watery and mushy.
• Valuable nutrients will leach out into the water used for boiling vegetables. So use that to make your stock, soup or gravy for your meal instead of fresh water.
• Avoid eating fried foods and burned foods and they often contain higher than normal levels of free radicals. These damage any vitamins and other nutrients in the food which survived the heat and can cause damage to cells in your body if eaten.
• And finally, don’t be tempted to heat up left over vegetables from the previous day. They will have lost a great deal of their nutritional value. Better to start again with fresh food.