When cooking for children, you have to keep in mind things
following.
How to preserve nutrients in foods while cooking is the
biggest concern of mothers as they want their children to get the best of the foods.
To preserve nutrients in foods, you should take notice of the following rules.
How to choose and store foods
Lean meat, skin-removed poultry and skimmed milk have more
nutrients in each calorie than fat, poultry and whole-cream milk. Whole grains
like rice, sticky rice, green bean, oats… also contain more vitamins than
refined grains. Vegetables that are dark-green or dark-yellow… have more
nutrients than light-color vegetable. Those are primary rules about choosing
foods for children.
Fresh fruits, meat
and vegetables are always better than canned foods.
About storing, fresh fruits, meat and vegetables are always
better than canned foods. This is of course. Some vegetables and fruits like
baby corn, mushroom or beans can have a half of their nutrients reduced when
being canned. However, fresh foods aren’t always better than frozen foods.
Frozen foods are prevented from enzymes that are able to destroy nutrients and
vitamins, which help frozen vegetables, meat and fish have their nutrients
preserved. Nonetheless, foods like potatoes and sweet potatoes should be stored
in dry and sunless places; do not store them in the fridge.
About fruits, you should choose season fruits so that you
can avoid the fact that fruits get ripe by reacting to chemicals and have the
natural sweet tastes of the fruits. To fruits like banana or pine apples, you
should have the ones that are ripe before being taken off the trees. Fruits
that get ripe under the sunlight contain more vitamins than ones that don’t.
For example, tomatoes that are planted outside have the content of vitamin
twice as much as ones that are planted inside.
During the cooking
By knowing how to
cook rightly, moms can preserve vitamins in foods.
There’re 3 rules to preserve nutrients in foods while cooking:
reducing the amount of water for cooking, reducing time that is used to cook
foods and reduce the food areas that contact with air.
Reduce water
Steaming is better than boiling; boiling is better than
grilling; grilling is better than frying. If you boil foods for your children,
you should only add a little amount of water or you can use the vegetable broth
for soup, ketchup or cooking porridge. Do not clean rice too much before
cooking.
Reducetime
Many kinds of vitamin are sensitive to heat. For that
reason, by cooking the foods, they will be destroyed. Reducing time used for
cooking the foods helps you to limit the number of nutrients that are lost.
Cover the pot is a good way to push on the cooking.
Reduce the contacting areas
You should cut vegetables into big pieces to cook. The big
pieces will reduce the areas that contact with air, which helps preserve
nutrients in the foods. You’d better mash the foods after cooking them.
Vitamins and minerals are different
Basically, minerals can resist heat. The number of calcium,
iron, magnesium, phosphorus, iodine… in cooked and uncooked foods are the same.
However, vitamins are vulnerable with heat. Moms should take notice of the
information below to know about the conditions in which vitamins are destroyed.
Nutrients that can be destroyed by heat: vitamin A, E, C,
thiamin, vitamin B6, folate, vitamin B12, pantothenic acid.
Nutrients that can be destroyed by air: vitamin E, C, B6 and
folate.
Nutrients that can be destroyed by water: vitamin C,
thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B6, B12, potassium.
Nutrients that can be destroyed by fat include: vitamin A,
E, D.
According to that, vitamin A, E, D should be cooked with oil
or grilled (better).
You’d better not
clean the rice before cooking.
As vitamin C is easily diluted in water, you should boil
vegetables that are rich in vitamin C in a small amount of water. For examples,
if you boil a cabbage with 4 bowls of water, you will lose 90% of the vitamin C
in the food. Also, if the cabbage is cooked with a bowl of water, you can keep
50% of the vitamin C in the food.
You shouldn’t clean rice very well. You’d better not clean
the rice before cooking. 25% of thiamin in rice is lost when being cleaned.
