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.
To can foods, you need to pre-cook them. The heating process usually destroys between a third and half of the vitamins A and C, and the riboflavin and thiamin, in produce. Then the canned food sits on shelves before you buy it. While in storage, the food loses another 5-20% of those vitamins. Other vitamins only decrease in value a small amount.
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.
Remember, the important factor is how quickly after harvest the produce is canned or frozen. In general, right after picking the produce is brought to the canning or freezing division. This is at peak nutrition.
Nutrient value is also affected by the canning method that is used to preserve the produce. When vegetables are boiled in a great deal of water, they lose much more of their nutritional value than do vegetables that are only lightly steamed.
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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