Steaming
No surprise here:
Steaming appears to be one of the best cooking methods for keeping the
vitamins and minerals in your veggies, especially broccoli, Brussels
sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage.
Optimize
the positive effects by keeping the cooking time to a minimum and
ensuring that your vegetables are not immersed in the water. If we
steam our food into mush—until it looks like baby food—we lose too many
nutrients.
Leave a little crunch in your carrots.
Although
steaming is an excellent choice for preparing your food, avoid the
“steamer” meals and side dishes found in the freezer aisle of the
grocery store. These products are designed to be microwaved in their
plastic packaging .
Frying
Though we all know
that frying isn’t the optimal way to prepare food, this method occupies
the middle ground when it comes to preserving antioxidant content. However, this isn’t an excuse to make French fries a new food group.
Deep
frying—a cooking method most common outside the home—is the biggest
no-no there is when it comes to food. Whether it’s fries, chicken
tenders, or onion rings on the menu, we’re likely exposing ourselves to
carcinogens and rancid oils. Avoid them like the plague or, at the very
least, eat sparingly.
Boiling
Boiling is generally associated with the greatest nutrient losses in meats and vegetables.
One study found that the folic acid in broccoli—important for producing
healthy red blood cells and reducing anemia—was reduced by 55 percent
after boiling. Compare that to steamed broccoli, which has been shown
to have no significant reduction in folic acid levels.Nutrient losses from boiling occur mainly when the nutrients are leached into the water, so the addition of a small amount of salt and a reduction of your cooking water can help.
Microwaving
This is an area
of great confusion and debate. Some people love it and some hate it.
And currently there’s just not enough science and information to
declare a winner, so we’re going to give you both sides of the argument
and let you decide.
The Good:
When food scientists reviewed vitamin and
mineral retention in twenty different vegetables, microwaving—like
steaming, grilling, and baking—was found to be an ideal method. As with
steaming, the less water and time used to microwave the food, the more
nutrients were kept. Ensuring an even distribution of heat will also
help, and despite what you may have heard, research suggests that
microwaves do not cause cancer.
The Bad:
The unanswered question is: If electromagnetic
fields can alter our cells, will they also alter the energetic
integrity of our food? Microwaves are electromagnetic waves, but so far
there is very little evidence that they mutate our foods.
Yet the migration of contaminants from the
containers that hold the food during heating is of growing concern.
Unlike grilling, baking, frying, and steaming, for which you can’t use
plastic containers because they’ll melt, microwaves allow cooking with
plastic, and plastic is a known hazard.
In addition, before we fire up a big bowl of our
favorite vegetables—or a bag of popcorn, if we’re being honest—we
should keep in mind that microwave ovens are powerful sources of
radiofrequency fields and can leak significant amounts of EMFs. The
only way to know for sure how much leakage is occurring is to
measure the EMFs with an inexpensive Gauss meter, which can be found
online or in home improvement stores.
Regardless, if we choose to use a microwave oven to cook, we shouldn’t stand and watch it like a television.
