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12 Cool Ways to Get the Most Nutrition from Your Veggies
Since man first figured out how to domesticate plants, we’ve been trying to make them more palatable. Most edible wild plants are too bitter, sour, astringent, tough, full of seeds, or dry to be enjoyable. Over the course of the last 12,000 years we’ve bred plants to taste better, to be more productive, and to be easier to harvest, store, and transport. But the real reason we eat, for nutrition, has rarely been a consideration!
Your brain needs a wide variety of nutrients found in plants. It needs vitamins,minerals, antioxidants to ward off free radical damage, and phytonutrients — compounds found in plants that promote human health. Scientists estimate there are over 10,000!
So while the food we now eat may be tastier and we can get it all year round, the cost is that its nutritional value has been left in the dust.
Foraging vs. Farming – No Contest!
Wild plants that our ancestors foraged are much more nutritious than the fruits and vegetable we eat today. Native plants contain more nutrients than comparable domesticated plants, and often a lot less sugar. For example, the original ancestor of corn, teosinte, contains a mere 2% sugar while sweet corn contains 40% sugar!
Wild plants also contain a lot more antioxidants and phytonutrients like beta carotene and lycopene. Wild tomatoes, for example, contain 15 times more lycopene than supermarket tomatoes. Wild apples in Nepal contains 100 times more phytonutrients than apple varieties we normally eat.
Of course, these wild versions would not receive many rave reviews from a modern western palate, either.
12 Cool “Veggie Hacks”
We can’t go back to exclusively foraging our food, but there are some amazing “veggie hacks” that you can use to get the most nutrition out of the vegetables you do eat. By properly using, storing, and preparing vegetables, you can up their nutritional content and enhance their bio-availability tremendously!
1. Eat broccoli first
Broccoli is one of the most perishable vegetables yet the average time from harvest to plate is a long 7 weeks. By the time you get it home it’s lost 80% of its nutrition. For this reason, try to buy broccoli at a farmer’s market and buy whole heads, not cut-up florets. Store in a perforated plastic bag in the fridge and eat within a day or two of purchase. Eat raw or cook minimally — steam for 4 minutes or sauté lightly.
2. Tear up lettuce before you store it
Most lettuce eaten in the US is the iceberg variety. This is the least nutritious kind. The more colorful and the looser the leaf, the more nutritious it will be. One of the weirdest tips is to tear your lettuce into bite-size pieces before storing. This activates it to produce more phytonutrients to protect itself from predators!
Better yet, skip lettuce and make salads with spinach, wild arugula, or radicchio, which are generally more nutrition-rich than lettuce.
3. Scallions trump onions
Sweet onions are the least nutritious type of onion and scallions are by far the most nutrition-dense. They contain an unbelievable 140 times more phytonutrients than white onions!
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/04/12-cool-ways-to-get-the-most-nutrition-from-your-veggies/
