Eating nutritious food is not an option, it is a necessity for a healthy life. Since the majority of the world’s population suffers from one or more types of nutritional deficiencies, it is even more important to ensure that your food has all the essential nutrients in sufficient quantity.
For a healthy and nutritious diet, you need to cook your meals in the healthiest way possible, choosing healthy ingredients and cooking them in the healthiest way possible. Here are the steps to cook food nutritionally:
Cook over medium heat:
The amount of heat that food is cooked to largely determines its nutritional outcome. Overcooking it would not only deprive your taste buds of natural flavors, but it would also destroy delicate nutrients (like complex carbohydrates). Therefore, it is advisable to cook food over medium heat. It will also prevent it from burning or sticking to the bottom of the pot. Even on medium heat, most cookware made of metal or ceramic (a non-natural material) destroy delicate nutrients. Read on to find out how it can be completely prevented.
Wash or rinse food the right way:
Different foods need to be washed differently to preserve their nutrients. In general, for most vegetables, it is recommended to wash them just before cutting so that the water soluble nutrients remain trapped. Avoid soaking your veggies as they can remove key nutrients, like vitamin C.
Don’t overcook the vegetables:
Overcooking vegetables makes them soft and tastes quite bland. It is important to cook them for the right time so that they are not raw or overcooked. Cooking for too long also reduces its nutritional value by breaking down nutrients at the molecular level.
Always use the right cookware, it makes a big difference!
Cookware makes a big difference to the health of your food. Most conventional metal and ceramic cookware make food unhealthy by contaminating it with reactive metal toxins and destroying nutrients with their strong heat. You can make your food much more nutritious by choosing the right kitchen utensils – healthy and non-toxic pure clay pots. Pure clay is naturally inert, so it does not react with food, a biochemical entity, and its unique far infrared heat keeps nutrients intact.
Steam management it is another important aspect of healthy cooking. Most of the steam generated in food is water soluble nutrients. Of the 13 essential vitamins and minerals, 9 are water soluble, which means that they dissolve in water, are used quickly in the body, and need to be replenished every day; the body does not store them. With conventional cookware, since steam constantly comes out of the pot, so do water-soluble nutrients, cooked foods remain deficient in one more way.
Pure clay pots can be ergonomically designed to naturally and fully take advantage of the bounties of nature, whereby rising steam encloses the inner surface of the lid, condenses and falls back into the food rather than out of the pot as with metals.
By taking care of these little things, you can ensure that you are cooking your food in the healthiest way possible and that your body is getting all the nutrients it needs.