What killed the nutrients in my food?

Let me start by first defining food. ‘Anything eaten to satisfy appetite and to meet physiological needs for growth, to maintain all body processes, and to supply energy to maintain body temperature and activity’. Whether you know the basic definition of a food or the professional definition, I know partly or fully you will agree with the definition provided above.

Food is not only eaten to satisfy appetite, not only to make you grow but also to help maintain all body processes, supply the energy needed for daily activities, help maintain body temperature and activity also we eat to help cure ailments and diseases, help put right what is wrong in our body so as to avoid going through the blades or ingesting unnecessary pills that could have been avoided.

Food materials that we have been endowed with from God seem to be an all-round blessing from God in terms of their meeting what the body actually requires. Each food material has its own peculiarity, its strength, its uniqueness that from a class of food according to the basic science classification of foods, so many articles, discoveries has been made and still being made and will yet be made. We have heard from different source that the food trend of centuries ago was to eat fresh thing, farm cultivated and the likes so what is wrong today are there no more farms or garden are what we are eating today grown in the sky? Although we know that our foods these days are chemical laden for one purpose or the other, notwithstanding we are eating food.

Hence for those who are so sensitive about what they eat, those who are so choosy about what they ingest, who are easily bothered about their dietary safety will want to get the best as much as they can from whatever food they ingest. But ignorantly after selectively picking what we want to eat hoping to give us their best in terms of nutrients and vitamins, we actually kill all benefits from the food through our food processing methods such as:

1.      Heat treatment: cooking food at high temperature usually above the boiling point of water actually is enough to destroy nutrients in food, nutrients are very heat sensitive and they are denaturalized easily by heat. But most of our food making process require that we heat-treat the food to get it done and ready to eat what then is the way out of this you may ask? Cooking at a temperature of about 85^oc maximum would do so turn down your cooker’s heat to medium to cook so as to preserve some nutrients.

2.      Soaking in water for as long as 10 minutes or more actually leaches out the nutrients in food and vitamins. Some nutrients and vitamins are water soluble and when you soak the food material in water for long for whatever reason be sure to have lost large chunk of water soluble vitamins and minerals.

If soaking will be done, use the water to make food as part of the ingredients you want to use to cook, so that the nutrients leached into the water will be taken into the system via the food cooked with it.

3.      Size reducing: when you shred food material into smaller units, you have just exposed the inherent enzymes in the food to react with air and oxidize away into something dangerous for consumption. Enzymatic browning takes place for the food material that has enzymes responsible for browning such as apples.

4.      Peeling: most tuber crops have more nutrients on their “backs” so when peeled off, you have lost substantial amount of nutrient, but when you want to cook root crops or tubers, they are best cooked after careful washing of their backs and sliced into smaller pieces, and cooking with minimal water because some people throw the excess water away meanwhile the nutrients leach into the water.

Among others….

Complains, suggestions and queries can be forwarded to the author via olagunjumobolaji@gmail.com. Thank you.