If you want to make sure you are eating a healthy diet full of vitamins and minerals, it isn’t enough to make sure you get multiple servings of fruits and veggies daily. You also need to consider what form of produce you are consuming. Canned food items from the supermarket are a bad choice. Generally, these are loaded with salt and preservatives.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are of course the freshest produce you can get. Next comes frozen foods. Canned foods are your least fresh alternative for produce. Because of this, canned items are slowly being phased out by many consumers.
When the foods are cooked prior to canning, the heating process destroys a lot of their nutritional value. They lose a third to a half of vitamins A and C, and riboflavin and thiamin. Remember too, they are stored for a while in the cans. While they are stored they lose an additional 5-20% of these nutrients. The remaining vitamins are mostly maintained intact.
It is common for produce to lose some nutrition after it is picked. Ideally it is handled properly and canned very quickly. If this is the case it can be almost as nutrition as fresh fruits or veggies.
Consider how fresh produce loses nutrients – in the first two weeks, generally half or more of the vitamins in fresh produce are gone. That’s with proper handling. If the produce has not been preserved or chilled, half of the vitamins are lost in the first few days after harvest. As an informed consumer interested in nutrition, you are recommended to eat a wide variety of produce.
The crucial point is to get freshly picked vegetables or fruits to the canning or freezing equipment right away, to preserve nutrient content. The nutritional value of the foods will depend heavily on the amount of time that passes between harvesting and preserving by canning or freezing.
The method used for canning also affects nutrient value. If you choose vegetables that were steamed for canning, this is going to be a smarter choice. Those veggies will hold more of their nutritional value than will vegetables that were boiled.
Picking fresh fruits and vegetables at a farm is always the most nutritious option, and is far superior to frozen or canned foods. If fresh produce isn’t an option, choose frozen over canned.
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