I have a question that’s the result of a shower thought.
They say you’re supposed to eat fruits and vegetables every day because they’re good for you.
Well, if you wanted to, would dehydrating vegetables and blending them up into a powder and then adding it into foods work? Like is the freshness where the nutrients come from? I can elaborate if it doesn’t make sense but now I’m really curious
When you say “is the freshness where the nutrients come from”, that sounds like I should start at the beginning.
Our bodies are basically really complicated machines made from atoms and molecules. Our bodies are basically machines that are constantly making their own parts to replace the parts that wear out. Life happens because our bodies are constantly making and replacing our parts when they wear out; that whole process is called metabolism.
But like any machine, our bodies need two things to make the parts: fuel, and raw materials.
That’s what nutrients are. They’re molecules that our bodies can use either as fuel, or, as raw materials for making the “parts” that our bodies are made from.
There’s lots of different types of those raw materials, and I won’t go into them all unless asked, but the point is, the nutrients don’t “come from the freshness”, they’re there in the food, because the living plant or animal, when it was alive, needed those same nutrients, those same biochemicals, in order to keep itself alive. Some of them, it made using its metabolism, in ways we can’t; and others, it ate from sources in the environment like we do.
So the idea is half-true, but backwards; the nutrients don’t “come from the freshness”, but, once the plant or animal dies, chemical reactions can happen that degrade and break down the nutrients into forms that we can’t use.
Thankfully, though, the chemical reactions of dehydration don’t degrade the nutrients completely, so, the dried vegetables will still have a lot of the same nutrition as the fresh ones did. It depends somewhat on the specifics of how it’s dehydrated, but the result by most methods is generally adequately nutrient-rich. For example, for freeze-drying:
>Most researchers agree that the amount of nutrients lost from freeze-drying is miniscule.
…although, if you’re cooking or blanching the vegetables beforehand, that can result in some of the nutrients leaching into the blanching water (at which point, they’re no longer in the food), and vitamin C is apparently very susceptible to oven-style air dehydration:
>Drying, like all methods of preservation, can result in loss of some nutrients. Nutritional changes that occur during drying include:>>…>>- Vitamin C: mostly destroyed during blanching and drying of vegetables.
But as per that second source, most of the others — the A and B vitamins, the fiber, the minerals, the calories — are all well-preserved by air dehydration.
There are powders you can add to smoothies - can’t recall what we used but it was labeled as power greens or something to that effect. Ingredients didn’t have much outside of dehydrated vegetables. It had little taste.
Fresher vegetables taste better, dehydrating does reduce the nutritional content somewhat (vs freeze drying which generally does not reduce it nearly as much) but its not like you can’t add more powdered vegetables to your food.