Baby Boomer Health – Eat Your Vegetables

Welcome to this weeks edition of Baby Boomer Health – Eat Your Vegetables

Show Notes:

 We all know we need to eat more vegetables.  Did you know how you process or cook your vegetables can be very important?

Raw and plain vegetables may not be the best way to eat them.  But there is no single cooking or preparation method that is best for all types of vegetables.

For example, fresh spinach loses 64% of its vitamin C when cooked.  Canned peas and carrots have lost 85 to 95 percent of their vitamin C.

For fat-soluble compounds such as vitamin A, D, E and K, a little cooking is helpful because it can breakdown the cell walls and make more available to us.

Another finding is against what many of us believe:  salsa or salad served with fat-rich avocado or full-fat dressing increased absorption of  lycopene by 4 times, 7 times for lutein and 18 times for beta carotene.  So fats in your diet can help.  And avocado has un-saturated fats – the good kind.

But the most important thing to remember is to make the vegetables taste good so you eat more.