Food Nutrition Guide

6 Ways to Retain Nutrients in Your Foods and Vegetables

This short, but comprehensive food nutrition guide will give you a brilliant start on how to retain the nutrients in your food.

Most people need some kind of guidance on how to retain nutrition in their foods. I did not know most of this information as well until some years ago. Lack of knowledge can sometimes be costly.

How to Retain More Nutrients In Food

Have you ever had a meal, stuffed yourself; and then an hour or two later you are already hungry? And you begin to wonder why you’re already hungry again because you really have just eaten.

Well, what’s happening there is that the body’s looking for the vitamins and minerals in the food to break down. If it doesn’t get it or doesn’t get enough, the body sends a signal to the brain saying I need more nutrients in food. But as humans, we interpret it as being hungry. So…

You go and eat again!

This food nutrition guide is teaching you how to not lose the nutrients in foods to the various cooking methods we use.

If you boil, steam, microwave, cook vegetables with any water at all, you are losing the nutrients in your food to those cooking methods.

The combination of heat, cooking water, exposure to air and light (oxidation), frying and cooking with oil, contributes greatly to making you lose nutrition in your meals by the time the food gets onto your table.

Here are a few tips from our food nutrition guide on how to retain nutrition your in foods when preparing and cooking them.

1. Skin of Foods

Eat foods with the skin on, though wash them thoroughly first. Cook any foods that grow under the ground with the skins on. Wash properly with a vegetable scrub or brush first though, so that you don’t make yourself more susceptible to infection unnecessarily.

2. Stay Air and Light-Proof

Cook in cookware that’s air tight and light-proof, so that oxidation is minimized. Ensure light and air cannot get into your pots and pans when you’re cooking. Get rid of see-through cover pots and pans, and the one with opaque covers that don’t shut tightly. That automatically solves some of the oxidation problem for you.

3. Heat Matters

Cook on low heat and reduce cooking times to a minimum. The longer you cook on high heat for, the more nutrition you lose from your foods. In fact the longer you cook for generally, the less nutrition you get from your foods. Heat destroys nutrients in foods. Granted, heat kills off bacteria as necessary, but in addition kills your nutrients. The very ones your body need for good subsistence!

It is understandable that people cook in high heat because they want the foods to cook fast (TIME). And also because that’s the way we’ve all been mostly taught to cook. But high heat contributes to food nutrient losses.

4. Water Leaches Your Food Nutrients

Don’t cook vegetables with water. Not even a little, if you can avoid it. Water leaches out the vitamins out of the vegetables. The way you know this is through the colour of the water you’re cooking the vegetables in.

Once the water changes colour, it is warning that you’re losing your vegetable nutrients and vitamins to the water you’re cooking or steaming with.

5. Consume Your Nutrients

If end up cooking with water for any reason, find a way to consume the water you’ve cooked in so that you can get the nutrients into where they’re supposed to be – inside your body. Not down the sink drain, or in the extractor fan from evaporation from heat application.

You can cook with that water or drink it. But don’t throw it away.

6. Healthy Cookware

A quick short cut is to use some healthy cooking systems. They usually come in form of cookware. “Healthy cookware”.

The importance of good nutrition cannot be overstated. Read more on our food nutrition guide and ways in which you unconsciously lose nutrition in your meals while cooking.