Fresh fruit and vegetables deliver premium health benefits if you can pick them and eat them readily, say specialists in this field. The longer produce is exposed to air and light, the quicker the vitamins and other nutrients break down. It may take several days, or even weeks after harvest for it to reach a grocery store, and then reach you.

On the other hand, produce that is designated for freezing is flash-frozen near to its source, quickly locking in the nutrients. In fact, frozen could be more. When cooking vegetables, don’t boil away valuable vitamins. Frozen veggies like corn and peas, broccoli, and butternut squash, can now be steamed quickly and conveniently the way Steam Ease does it. Independent lab analysis compared steaming of broccoli to conventional stovetop boiling. The results showed that Steam Ease technology retains 1.5 times more vitamin C and 40% more folic acid than boiled. More information is online at Omsteadfoods

article supplied by NewsCanada