How you prep your food matters

Prep matters

Dr Luis Rustveld, a registered dietitian and an associate professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, USA says: "Even before cooking, your approach to preparing food - such as by chopping, blending or grinding affects the nutrition value."

Here are some of the different food prep methods and how healthy they are.

Juicing and blending

Juicing and blending may seem similar, but they aren't the same. Juicing extracts liquid from a food whilst blending takes the entire fruit or vegetable and cuts it into tiny bits.

Your body reacts to each method differently.

Juice can be digested quickly, Rustveld says, and that's not always good. Take the example of an orange. One whole orange has about 16 grams of carbohydrates, with about three of those grams coming from fibre, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The fibre from oranges slows how quickly carbs hit the bloodstream.

Juicing strains out fibre, Rustveld says, so that glass of orange juice could cause unhealthy spikes in blood glucose.

And because juice doesn't fill you up, you're likely to drink more of it than if you eat something whole. Sticking with the orange example, few of us would eat four or five in one setting, but it takes that many oranges to provide one 1 cup of juice, Rustveld says. That can add up to a lot of carbs and calories.

A study published in the Journal of Food Science¹ in 2012 found that blended grapefruit also had more phytonutrients - plant-derived substances that may boost health - than grapefruit juice.

Chopping

Cutting fruits and vegetables into small pieces can make it easier for your body to access some nutrients, Rustveld says: "There are certain foods that actually can benefit from cutting it up or blending it."

Bright orange foods, such as carrots and mangoes, are loaded with antioxidants, he says, which can help fight inflammation and aging. Chopping those foods can break down cell walls, releasing those antioxidants.

Chopping peppers, spinach, potatoes or apple skins also helps release antioxidants, Rustveld says. And studies have shown the same effect with celery, lettuce and parsnips.

Similarly, Rustveld says, cutting up garlic and onions releases heart-healthy sulphur compounds.

If you keep the foods on the cutting board for a long time before using them, you're going to lose some of the benefits, he says: "Store them as quickly as possible in a tight container where they're not exposed to air, or use them right away."

Grinding

Flax and chia seeds have become popular additions to many diets.

"Flaxseeds are loaded with plant-based omega-3," Rustveld says. Those fatty acids have been linked to reduced likelihood for heart disease and cognitive decline.

Chia seeds are a little easier to chew, he says. But studies have shown that more nutrients are released by grinding them. Or, Rustveld says, try soaking them before eating.

Peeling

As a matter of taste, you might peel your produce. But that will change the nutrition, Rustveld says.

In the case of an apple, removing the peel will leave you with, "a spongy material that is delicious, and it's healthy," but the peel you're tossing has both nutrients and fibre. Similarly, he says, the peel is where you'll find most of the vitamin K in a cucumber.

But the effect varies by the food you're talking about. Tomato skins are full of healthy lycopene - an antioxidant that works as an anti-inflammatory - but boiling or steaming a tomato until the skin starts to loosen actually makes that lycopene more available to your body, he says.

Matters of taste

Preparation is about more than nutrition, Rustveld says.

When you slice something up, it can cook more quickly. "If I am in a rush, I don't have time to sit there and wait for my pork or my chicken to finish cooking. I will cut it up," Rustveld says.

It's also a matter of presentation. Some chefs wouldn't want to cut a piece of chicken or a piece of fish. "It all depends on your preference," he says.

And preparation affects taste. The chemicals released by chopping onions or cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli change their flavour. Foodies say that how you cut an ingredient affects how it absorbs other flavours from the dish.

Other factors

When it comes to health, how you prep a food matters less than what that food is, Rustveld says. After all, a chocolate cake is still a chocolate cake no matter what method you use to slice it.

And whatever you're eating, Rustveld says, the cooking method will make a big difference.

"Are you frying it? Are you baking it? Are you grilling it? Are you using air fry? Are you boiling it, steaming it, microwaving it? Are you putting butter in it?" All those will affect nutrition much more than how you cut it beforehand, he says.

"Even though I can start with something very healthy," Rustveld says, "I can end up increasing my likelihood of heart disease by the way that I'm cooking it."

In general, Rustveld says: "Do not engage in any prepping strategies or methods that are going to render a very healthy food unhealthy."

This article is published with kind permission of the American Heart Association, which has been striving to save and improve lives for more than 100 years.

References

1. Uckoo et al: Grapefruit (Citrus paradisi Macfad) Phytochemicals Composition Is Modulated by Household Processing Techniques

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