www.Talking Cooking.com

Vitamins are nutrients that are necessary for the proper functioning of the human body and its various organs. While vitamins are found in fruits, vegetables, cereals and other foods, they cannot be synthesized by the human body. As a result, we need to obtain our vitamins from food so that our bodies remain healthy and function properly. Unfortunately, many popular cooking techniques lead to excessive vitamin loss, due to which we often end up being deficient in essential vitamins in spite of having a “balanced” diet. Minimizing vitamin loss from food during cooking will not only help you eat healthy, it will also make your food tastier.  Some tips that will help you minimize vitamin loss while cooking and get the maximum benefit from what you eat are listed here.

• Before we get down to vitamin loss through cooking, it is important to realize that food items also lose vitamins through exposure to air, water, light and heat. It is because of this reason that nutritionists advise eating fresh produce as much as possible, since they fresh foods get exposed to the elements for the least amount of time. If you cannot go out and buy fresh produce everyday, make sure that you store your fruits, vegetables and meat at the right temperatures in the fridge and freezer. Wrap and pack everything so that exposure to light and air is the least. This will ensure that your food items are still left with vitamins to lose when you pop them into the pan.

• Fruits, vegetables and meat lose the maximum vitamins when they are cooked at high temperatures for long periods of time. Therefore, one of the best ways of reducing vitamin loss during cooking is to use the microwave. Since foods get cooked quickly in the microwave, they end up retaining most of the nutrition. Try to avoid adding water to the food as much as possible since this aids vitamin loss. Research has shown that broccoli and cabbage cooked in the microwave lose only one third the amount of vitamin C that is lost when they are boiled. It has also been proven that a minimal vitamin loss takes place when food is reheated in the microwave.

• Another method of cooking where vitamin loss is the minimum is steaming. Steamed food also gets cooked quickly, does not involve loss of vitamins to water drainage and is generally not overcooked, especially when compared to boiled food. As a result, it has been found that vegetables lose less than 50% of the nutrition when they are steamed as compared to when they are boiled.

• If a recipe leaves you with no option but to boil a vegetable, then make sure that you put it in the water only when the water starts boiling instead of putting it on the stove with cold water. Use the minimum possible amount of water and cut the vegetables into large pieces or boil them whole to keep exposure to a minimum. Also, do not over boil and let the veggies stay on the stove for as little a time as you can, of course ensuring that they are done for the recipe.

• Baking, roasting and deep frying food at high temperatures leads to the maximum amount of vitamin loss during cooking. So make sure that you avoid over cooking food in the oven. Try to cut out deep frying from daily cooking as much as possible and save these techniques for special occasions and parties.