Hey there everybody this is Monica Reinagle and you're listening to the

nutrition diva quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous

today's episode is about how cooking affects the nutrient content of your food.

Hi Monica, this is Jennifer Narrowson. I'm a nutrition student at Montana State

University in Bozeman, Montana, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how

cooking affects the nutritional value of food.

I've heard mixed things, and I love cooking, and I want to get the most out of my food also so I was just

wanting to learn more. Thanks. Thanks for your question Jennifer. Cooking or

reheating foods can diminish their nutritional value because some vitamins are degraded by heat.

One quick and dirty tip for retaining maximum nutrition in your food is to minimize cooking time.

Heat isn't the only problem though.

When you cook foods in water or other fluids, some of the nutrients end up leaching out of the

food and into the cooking liquid.

So another quick and dirty tip is to incorporate cooking liquids into the finished dish whenever possible.

Now some nutrients are more affected by cooking than others. Calcium is pretty sturdy for example,

while vitamin C, folate, and potassium are quite fragile.

And different cooking methods also affect various nutrients differently.

As a general rule, minerals can really take the heat.

In fact, dry heat such as baking or roasting hardly affects the

mineral content of a food at all. Vitamins on the other hand seem to do slightly better

with moist cooking methods such as boiling or steaming, but that's mostly because the cooking times are so much shorter.

A raw potato, for example, contains a decent amount of both calcium and vitamin C.

...