The nutrition tables you can find, can hardly be complete enough to know what you’re getting from your food for different reasons such as is the food organic or not?, is it raw or cooked?, how cooked is the food?, what kind of treatment it received?, is it irradiated?, if it’s a vegetable food, was it harvested ripe or green?, what kind of soil it was cultivated? Is it just sprouted?, is it dehydrated?
So, because you don’t really know precisely all the nutrients in a food, you can only have a good guess and keep in mind which food treatments low the nutritional value and in which extent.
What do you do with that lack or precise information?
You just put as many odds in your favor by consciously eating according to these guidelines :
- Many prepared foods display nutritional values based on added vitamins or other nutrients that are not necessary useful that way, so they are often in the list of ingredients for reasons of marketing.
- Some of those added vitamins are even bad for your health such as vitamin A added to cereals, which increases the risk of osteoporosis, especially if there is a deficiency of vitamin D.
- Organic better than non-organic Organic food is not only intended to not have the chemicals that causes many undesirable health conditions but is also much more nutritious.
- Freshly harvested better than not so fresh
- Ripen in the tree or plant is better to have the most nutrients possible as the tree/plant is still adding nutrients from the soil to the fruit or vegetable.
- Besides being pasteurized or cooked, bottled, canned or boxed juices from concentrate have more fluoride and other chemicals from the tap water they are reconstituted with. At least those not from concentrate are not that bad.
- Green house grown even if not organic is better than ordinary pesticide-laden food. For example, sometimes I get tomatoes, spinach and cucumbers grown in green house when I don’t find the organic ones
- Some vegetables that are harvested young require less or no pesticides to be grown. So non-organic baby spinach is often better the regular spinach.
- Local harvested organic food is better than imported organic same kind of food for freshness and economic-ecological reasons.
- Many foods and especially spices are irradiated supposedly for the “safety of consumers” and for the sterilization of seeds that agencies don’t want you to cultivate. That exposure to radiation destroys much of the nutritional value and it is also bad for your health http://www.ccnr.org/food_irradiation.html
- Sprouted seeds have more enzymes than raw or cooked same seeds.
- Vegetable sprouts (such as broccoli) as more nutritious than the ordinary vegetables.
- Raw food in general has more enzymes and nutrients than cooked food. So, because of the more enzymes the need for proteins decreases. Some scientists say that because some nutrients are more available after cooking it means that a cooked product (such as carrots) is more nutritious. That’s a touchy subject because like in this case the higher glycemic index of the cooked carrot makes it less desirable for other reasons. In the case of certain herbs we do need cooking to get the elements we desire out of the herb, but with ordinary food I tend to be in favor of raw eating. I’m not going to go deeper with this controversial subject, so just happily follow your heart.
- Intentionally fermented foods such as sauerkraut, natural pickles or nut cheeses are much more digestible and so they are more nutritious as a consequence. So this is a good way to eat more raw food with more availability of nutrients.
- Microwaving is the worst kind of cooking you can make in terms of destroying the nutritious value and creating very harmful toxins.
- Slow cooking is better than fast cooking.
- Frying can cause a lot of free radicals and many health problems as a consequence due to fat oxidation and higher cooking temperature. More details later.
* Frying with coconut oil or with organic ghee (clarified butter) is much safer as those fats are much more resisting the oxidation cause by heat.
- Roasting is not the best thing to do with animal products or other foods either because of the denaturation of proteins and starches, which can make them toxic even if we don’t experience immediate discomfort.
For example, acrylamide is used as an industrial chemical in mining and grouting. It was only discovered to be present in food in 2002. It forms as a side effect of the frying, roasting or baking of starchy foods, such as chips and crisps.
There are concerns about its cancer-causing and DNA-damaging effects in humans. It has been found to cause tumours in laboratory rats and is also neurotoxic in humans and may affect reproductive processes.
No specific limits for its consumption have yet been set by the EU, but food manufacturers are being urged to reduce levels and keep them as low as possible.
- On the other hand there is the Maillard reaction including caramelization, glycation and other effects of cooking mixtures such as sugars with fats, sugars with proteins or with starches. It not decreases the nutritional value but increases the presence of toxic waste-products.
- Dehydration is much better than cooking but not as good as eating fresh. In the case of sweet fruits particularly, the glycemic index increases and so it may have an undesirable effect on blood sugar which will affect some people more than others. For example those who suffer from Candida, hypoglycemia, diabetes etc.
- Canned foods are not only less nutritious because the enzymes are purposely destroyed to increase shelf-life , but also most of the time they contain substances that are undesirably toxic such as sulphites.
- Food additives such as artificial coloring and flavors are so evidently undesirable that I almost didn’t write about it. There are so many problems and health conditions caused by those additives, so at least, look for the foods that are prepared without them. Even some so called natural ingredients are undesirable, but that’s the subject for a whole book.
- Eating food that is prepared by a consciously happy person will make that food be more beneficial and probably delicious too. So, it’s not just about the ingredients or the treatments but about how much love vs stress brought that food to your plate.
- Some fruits and vegetables, when are not organically grown, are a reason so many workers get very serious diseases including deformities in children and cancers even is the consumers don’t get sick. For conscientious reasons we can avoid consuming for example non-organic pineapples or tomatoes.
- Some fruits and vegetables are produced in inhumane conditions of exploitation so that is another reason to do informed choices such as buying fair-trade foods. Personally I don’t buy unhealthy fair-trade foods either such as sugar.
- Adding some spices and herbs to your food can make it easier to digest also, so it is not only about avoidance of toxins but about conscious eating.
- Mixing foods while cooking can cause the Mailard reaction as I said before but even mixing raw foods can cause digestive problems. So, without getting too bored with your food, find your subjective balance between simplicity an pleasure. You can learn about food combining, mono-meals or just happily accept the possible consequences (as like when I go to raw potlucks I pay the consequences but have a lot of pleasure on the other hand).
Conclusion:
Now you may better know the difference in the quality of the produce that compose what you eat and you know a bit more about the effects of processing, stoking, irradiating, refining, caning, cooking, frying, microwaving, caramelizing, fermenting, sprouting, dehydrating etc. You can make more conscious choices about what you put in your mouth.
The real nutritional value of food cannot be so simply determined just by a laboratory analysis but you can feel it subjectively, when with practice you become more sensitive which is the only thing that counts.
