What we eat is a reflection of our health. Modern life demands a very practical life, modern society prefers to eat fast food or purchased food. Most of us also only know how to process food without knowing whether the nutrients in these foods are still intact when consumed. Cooking on your own is one way of presenting healthy and clean dishes rather than buying food outside. Even by cooking ourselves, we can choose many variations of food, food quality and calculate how many calories in each portion of the food we consume.
Processing food if it is not cooked in the right way, even though the food is highly nutritious, it will still lose its nutrients. Especially food ingredients that contain vitamin B1, vitamin C, and polyphenols, which are easily damaged. One cooking technique that can reduce the nutritional value of food is by frying at high temperature and deep fried or using a lot of oil.
Here are some simple tricks to treat vegetables to maintain their natural nutrition.
• Steamed vegetables will be better preserved nutrition. Steaming is also one of the right ways to process vegetables because this technique can retain all of the nutritional content and natural taste of vegetables, but sometimes if it's monotonous it will feel boring. To add flavor, you can and also add nutrients, you can add a little healthy fats such as olive oil, avocado oil, or oil found in fish. Steaming vegetables shouldn't be too long for 5-10 minutes.
• Eating vegetables in raw form can be an alternative to maintain nutrition too, because if cooked can destroy the enzymes and healthy compounds that can only be released when the vegetables are chewed. For example dark green vegetables such as broccoli, kale contain anti-cancer chemicals glucosinolate and myrosinase enzymes, which function to keep bacteria, fungi and harmful organisms away from the body.
• Cook vegetables with a little water, because when boiled, the nutrients of the vegetables will dissolve in the cooking water. It can be seen from the color that comes out of the vegetables and mixes with the water to become cloudy. Microwave cooking vegetables can also be an alternative to preserve nutrients.
• Vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, etc. will be guaranteed their nutrition when they are fresh than similar foods that have been frozen or stored for a long time. Avoid stocking too much food, because it will lose nutrients little by little if not consumed immediately.
• Vegetables with a high iron content such as spinach, kale, broccoli will be more effective in absorbing nutrients if you add lime juice, grapefruit, or various other citrus fruits. Because fruits containing vitamin C will help the process of absorbing iron for the body. Also keep in mind, vegetables with iron content should not be heated repeatedly because it can damage their nutrients and also turn into toxic food ingredients.
• Combining raw and cooked foods in the daily diet. This will help the availability of nutrients in the food menu that we consume. Some foods that contain Vitamin B, Vitamin C, and Folic acid will lose their nutrients when cooked. But there are also some food ingredients that will release their nutrients by cooking such as carrots that must be cooked first to maintain the antioxidant compounds in them, especially carotenoids. Tomatoes as well as mushrooms must be cooked first. Cooking tomatoes functions to break down lycopene which can fight cancer and the risk of heart disease.
