Make Healthy Food Even Healthier
Distilling data from more than 600 scientific studies, Jo Robinson shares how to pick and prepare foods for maximum health benefits.
PICK
Berries yield four times as much antioxidant activity as the majority of other fruits, 10 times as much as most vegetables, and 40 times as much as some cereals.
Welch’s Concord Grape Juice is more nutritious than any other juice in the supermarket.
Mangoes have five times the vitamin C of oranges, five times as much fiber as pineapples, and a generous number of phytonutrients.
Scallions have 140 times as many phytonutrients, the chemical compounds that promote health, as common white onions, and the greens are a more concentrated source than the whites.
Beets yield more antioxidant activity than all other common vegetables except for artichokes, red cabbage, kale, and bell peppers.
Just half of a medium-size avocado provides six grams of soluble fiber—more than a bowl of oatmeal cereal.
Hunter-gatherers who consumed calcium-rich wild greens had stronger bones than we do, even though they did not eat any dairy products.
PREPARE
Broccoli begins to lose its cancer-fighting compounds within 24 hours of harvest, so it should be eaten as quickly as possible.
Chopping or mincing garlic cloves and allowing them to sit for 10 minutes before cooking them activates the allicin, which gives garlic its antioxidant, antibacterial, antiviral, anticlotting, and anticancer properties.
Our bodies cannot absorb some of the most important nutrients in salad greens unless we eat them with some type of fat. Most bottled salad dressings are made with soybean oil. It requires almost seven times as much soybean oil as olive oil to make the nutrients in the salad bioavailable to the body.
Most berries become richer in antioxidants the longer you cook them, making canned blueberries more nutritious than fresh. Antioxidants are micronutrients that protect tissues in the body and strengthen the immune system.
If you cook potatoes and then chill them for about 24 hours, they are transformed from a high-glycemic to a low- or moderate-glycemic vegetable.
The longer you cook tomatoes, the more health benefits they provide. Canned tomatoes are more nutritious than fresh ones.
