The Matter of Food Handling & Preparation
7th April 2021
Are you living on a healthy way? Do you pay attention to the way of your food handling and food preparation? Did you know that food handling and food preparation is very important? Here is why….
If you already decided to change your lifestyle and go for healthy options of food it is half success as the first step of changing always the decision.
There are many points to consider when you make food choices, but should not forget how important is fact of the way how you prepare, store and cook your food to preferably obtain your vitamin and mineral intake from a balanced diet.
We have to consider that overall quality of vitamins and minerals may be impaired: how fresh are the vegetables and fruits?
Let me explain what do I mean under the importance of the freshness.
How fresh is the orange in the supermarket?
They pick the oranges and then a couple of days later they tucked them into a container. They been shipped by lorry across Europe or to the airport then they moved them by road to the final destination.
The oranges exposed to oxygen and they got exhaust fumes during the journey as well as physical handling. These are all processes that will affect the Vitamin C and the the antioxidants, the quality of the oranges in the supermarkets.
Then the boxes tipped out in the supermarkets into the display cases which means more physical handling then they exposed to bright light then customers come and have a good feel for the best orange.
After all this handling and transport of the oranges , the Vitamin C content will be much lower than when they were first picked.
There are further steps of destroying the vitamins and antioxidants like preparing the food, cooking and storing it.
We subject fresh fruits and vegetables to food preparation and cooking which can guarantee the further reduce of the food nutrition value.
We need to bear in mind that Vitamin C can be destroyed under certain conditions like:
light
heat
alkali
air
physical processing
cooking
Vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin, can be easily destroyed or wasted with the wrong way of food storage or preparation.
Pay attention to minimise vitamin loss. Choose the style of your preparation and cooking technique mindfully to preserve the nutrition quality of the food.
The best way to do preserve Vitamin C is to store fruit juices- and all the food with Vitamin C content- in an airtight container in dark and cool temperature in the fridge.
Choose stir frying, steaming or microwaving as your cooking technique as boiling vegetables destroys most of the vitamin’s quality.
You can read more about the different type of cooking methods here: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cooking-nutrient-content
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