Cooking food and minerals

The best way to meet our body's mineral requirements is through an adequate, balanced and nutrient-rich diet. Minerals are essential nutrients for our health, hence the need to learn more about their characteristics and peculiarities. The way we prepare our meals has a significant influence on the nutrient load that will reach our organism. The exposure of certain foods to high temperatures for a prolonged period of time can affect their nutritional potential.

During the development of this guide, we will be addressing some of the basic elements that revolve around this topic, reviewing which are the best ways to prepare our food if we want to make the most of its properties and benefits for our health.

Cooking with steam

It is a fact that subjecting our food to high temperatures for a prolonged period of time results in a significant loss of the nutrients it contains, especially vitamins and minerals. However, this does not mean that we should not cook our food.

If we did not cook our food, we would probably have to forego the consumption of many products that do not have a good taste or texture before cooking. Likewise, cooking our food makes it more chewy, which aids in the digestion and decomposition of food. Cooking food also influences the elimination of numerous toxins that can be very harmful to our organism, all this said, it is best to know which are the most appropriate ways to cook them.

Some products may not be the most suitable to be cooked in this way, but of all cooking methods, steaming has proven to be one of the most effective in preserving the nutrients in our food.

Reducing water, temperature and cooking times

As mentioned above, there is no 100% successful way of cooking to fully preserve the nutrients in our food. However, steaming has proven to be quite efficient in reducing the loss of vitamins and minerals due to heat. Some of the recommendations that can be implemented to optimize the preservation processes of our nutrients are the following:

• Decrease the water we use during cooking: it has been proven that the less water we use during cooking processes, the less minerals are lost during cooking. Adjust the water levels to the minimum necessary for your food to cook and in this way you will be collaborating in the nutritional load that the products will have at the end of cooking.

• Lower the temperature during cooking: Another recommendation to optimize our cooking and preserve a greater amount of nutrients is to cook our food at low heat. The cooking process at low temperatures is much more efficient, since high temperatures cause nutrients to be lost.
• Decrease cooking times: On many occasions we overdo the time we dedicate to cooking our food, either because we are not attentive or because we have become accustomed to a more intense cooking. Try to cook your products for the minimum time necessary, in this way we will avoid that these are subjected to prolonged periods of heat that are unnecessary for the purposes we seek.

Keep in mind that each food has its own characteristics and reacts in a particular way to high temperatures. Try to document beforehand what the indicated cooking times are, so that you can manage the cooking process as efficiently as possible.