What's the healthiest way to eat vegetables? American dieticians reveal

When it comes to eating healthy, we all have plenty of questions on how to eat vegetables. Whether to eat them raw, or cook? Boil or steam? What do we do to get the benefits of vegetables? Well, let’s leave all this thinking to the experts!

Dietician Carlene Thomas of Leesburg, Virginia often gets bombarded with these questions. According to her, two types of people ask her advice about the healthiest way to prepare vegetables; those who are looking to improve their diet and is curious about how to incorporate cooking methods, and others who want to add more vegetables to their diet. Thomas only has one answer for both - The best vegetables are the ones you actually want to eat.

She told AP that a lot of people engage in ‘aspirational vegetable shopping’ rather than eating them. To such people, she would say, “It doesn’t matter how you cook them, because if they’re going in the trash, they’re not in your body.”

However, studies suggest that different cooking methods have different effects on nutrition. No, it's not as simple as raw vs. steamed vs. roasted.

While some people believe that raw vegetables are healthier than cooked, Thomas says, “Not always.” Though prolonged exposure to high heat degrades many nutrients, the process of cooking softens cellular walls in vegetables, and helps your body to digest more easily. Cooking changes the structure and increases the bioavailability, which is the body’s ability to absorb the vegetables’ nutrients. This way, cooked food can be more nutritious than raw food. She noted that cooked tomatoes, release more of the cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene than raw. Cooked carrots have more beta-carotene that can be absorbed. Similarly, roasting pumpkins, carrots, and sweet potatoes boost carotenoids, which are antioxidants that combat inflammation.

So, what’s the healthiest cooking method? Dietician Amber Pankonin from Lincoln, Nebraska said, “the shorter the cooking time, the more nutrients are preserved” Steaming and microwaving are considered the most nutritious methods as they take relatively little time and do not require fat to cook.
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Blanching, where you toss vegetables into the boiling water for a minute or two is the second winner. But remember, donot leave the vegetables in water for long. “It’s leaching into the water, and you’re tossing out the water. There goes all of the nutrients that you were hoping for,” Thomas said.

Pankonin also agrees that there’s no problem using a small amount of fat to amp up the taste. A little cooking oil makes vegetables more flavourful, and helps fat-soluble vitamins absorb in the body. That means more vitamin A from squash, carrots, and sweet potatoes, more vitamin D from mushrooms, more vitamin E from bell peppers, leafy greens, and asparagus, and more vitamin K from greens, broccoli, and onions.

If you love to saute your vegetables, Pankonin recommends starting over medium heat with a tablespoon of oil. For roasting, you probably need double the oil per pound of vegetables. But despite the longer cooking time, it still maintains some nutrients. The caramelization of the natural sugars will also boost the flavour.

“Flavor is king. I would much rather see people roasting their vegetables and enjoying them, versus dealing with the mushy vegetables they’ve boiled and boiled,” Pankonin added.