Multiply the health benefits of veggies....

Today's post: Tuesday, 4-29-2008

Eating lots of green & nonstarchy vegetables is one of the most powerful & effective keys to losing excess fat. And, it also helps prevent you from getting excessively fat in the first place or from having fat you’ve already lost return.

And, with the exception of processed potatoes like French fries & potato chips, eating almost any vegetable gives you nutrients & micro nutrients to keep you healthy.

And, you can get the most of these health protecting nutrients by choosing & eating organic produce. It has been consistently tested to be much higher in these nutrients than vegetables grown with pesticides & herbicides.

Also, it protects you against cancer best to eat cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli & cauliflower raw as heat destroys some of their cancer protection according to a recent study.

However, cooking vegetables sometimes gives you a LOT more nutrition.

Tomato sauce with olive oil or other forms of cooked tomatoes give you far more delivery of the carotenes, such as lycopene that they contain than raw ones do. Since for some nutrients, the raw tomatoes may give you more, it may make sense to eat both kinds of tomatoes. Tastewise they are like two different foods. I like them both ways.

Here is the unusually good news that I learned last Friday.

My wife has been steaming a variety of vegetables as a regular part of her dinner. And, the few times she has given me tastes, I was pleasantly surprised by how steaming brought out the flavor of the vegetables & made them a lot more enjoyable to eat.

The good news is that steaming the vegetables not only makes them taste better, it apparently makes the anti-oxidants in many vegetables more bioavailable & multiplies the nutrition you get from them.

This means steaming vegetables is often a great idea.

Here’s the article I got from Early to Rise:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.”

“Add Steam, Boost Antioxidants

By Kelley Herring

Some cooking methods can release disease-causing toxins called AGEs (advanced glycation end products). And other methods can maximize the antioxidant ability of certain foods, unleashing their anti-aging potential.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition evaluated the antioxidant content of foods after they were prepared in several different ways. Based on the results of that study, here's how to get far more free-radical fighting ability out of some of your favorites than they have when they're raw:

Carrots: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 291%; boiling by 129-159%.

Asparagus: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 205%.

Broccoli: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 122-654%.

Green Cabbage: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 448%.

Red Cabbage: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 270%.

Green Pepper: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 467%.

Red Pepper: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 180%.

Tomatoes: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 112-164%.

Spinach: Boiling boosts antioxidants by 84-114%.

Sweet Potatoes: Steaming boosts antioxidants by 413%.

[Ed. Note: Kelley Herring is founder and CEO of Healing Gourmet (www.healinggourmet.com). Simple choices - like how you cook your food - can make all the difference in the world when it comes to your health.”