Bake for Better Nutrition?
Raw foodists tend to make extravagant claims for the health benefits of uncooked vegetables, and it’s tempting to believe them. After all, we have all been warned of the dangers of overeating “processed” foods, and cooking is indeed a form of processing.
But research at University of Arkansas, published in the
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, confirms that cooked, pureed carrots contain more available antioxidants than the raw kind. Scientists found that antioxidant levels in carrots increased by 34.3 percent immediately after heat processing. Perhaps more surprising, those levels continued to climb for the first week that the cooked carrots were stored.
So don’t hesitate to cook your carrots, and eat the leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. And don’t hesitate to grow them yourself, organically, as we do
here at my ranch. There are few treats that can compete with a fork-tender baked carrot, especially one plucked from the garden that very day. Incidentally, this does not apply only to carrots; lycopene, an antioxidant important for prostate health, is only highly available in cooked tomatoes, not raw ones
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