Diet & Fitness 

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Optimal Value

Eating a balanced diet may seem like the most obvious way to get your vitamins and minerals, but are you getting the maximum nutritional value from your food?

Although Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver may beg to differ, the real reason we cook our food is to increase the digestibility and eating quality of raw fare. However, while it almost always improves the taste, cooking also results in many nutrients being lost in the process. So how can you optimise the nutrients in your food without compromising the flavour?

The most vulnerable nutrients in our foods are those that are water soluble - meaning those that can be dissolved in water - such as B group vitamins and vitamin C.

Vitamin C
Being water soluble, this vitamin is easily destroyed by heat or through extended exposure to air. This means that during both the preparation of vegetables and fruit - after they have been peeled or shredded - and cooking, vitamins are rapidly lost. The best way to maximise the vitamin C content is as follows:

• Prepare fruit and veggies just before you are going to use them.
• Use only a small amount of water when cooking and cook veggies for only a short period of time. This includes adding veggies to boiling rather than cold water to reduce their time spent in water.
• Don't add sodium bicarbonate to the cooking water in order to retain the green colour of veggies, as this will only speed up the rate at which vitamin C is lost. This is because the vitamin is unstable under an alkaline environment.
• Don't delay serving veggies once they're cooked, as the levels of vitamin C drop with time. For example, if cabbages are kept warm and left for half an hour before serving, 40% of the vitamin C is lost.
• The vitamin C content in fruit and vegetables decreases with storage. While you may not think that potatoes provide much vitamin C, because we tend to eat a lot of them they are actually a very useful source. Vitamin C levels are highest in new potatoes and freshly dug potatoes and fall gradually after harvesting and storage.
• Different methods of cooking potatoes will affect the vitamin C content. For example, if potatoes are peeled before they are boiled, between 20 to 50 per cent of vitamin C can be lost. This is because vitamin C is present just underneath the skin of potatoes. It's therefore best to either boil or bake potatoes with their skin intact.
• Freezing veggies and fruit as a way of prolonging their life won't result in large losses of vitamin C unless they have been blanched beforehand.

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