Since we won’t require oil, the downside will be we won’t get fat soluble vitamins. So can we apply oil to veggies before or after cooking to yield the benefits?
Edit - By healthiest I mean, nutrient and vitamin retention and it’s bioavailability.
Please cite the sources.
Fat is good for you, do not cut it out completely from your diet. Put your veggies in a bowl and weigh out 10-20g of olive oil(100calories or 200calories) Toss in a bowl with whatever seasonings you want and roast them in the oven.
Steaming, blanching and eating them raw is the “healthiest” option but IMO eating veggies and rotating how you eat them is the spice of life and the true healthiest option. It doesn’t matter where or when you add the oil, roast them with the oil to caramelize or drizzle with it after.
You can add oils in other ways, such as nuts, tahini, avocado, olives, seeds, or nut butters. I love steamed broccoli with some tahini and lemon juice drizzled over the top. You can also just drizzle oil over steamed veggies.
Just my opinion, but prepare them in whatever way so you actually eat them every day. Steamed vegetables don’t taste great to a lot of people, so you might try blanching or roasting them in the oven with some olive oil and seasoning. I wouldn’t assume that adding a drizzle of oil while seasoning or cooking vegetables is going to have any significantly negative impact on your health.
Yes, you lose the less nutrients by steaming. For fat-soluble vitamins, just make sure you are including some fat in your meal. It doesn’t have to be on the veggies, it can be part of the protein or a salad dressing that you add at the end. It all mixes up in your stomach and allows your body to absorb each micronutrient.
Depends on your diet goals, but most of my goals benefit from adding some fat. My meals usually consist of a combination of raw and cooked veggies, raw being a salad. All my meals have a salad. For cooking veggies, my go to method is pan roasting with a drizzle of olive oil and plenty of seasoning. MUCH tastier than steaming (unless I take those par-steamed veggies and sauté them in butter, which I will do sometimes).
Depends but boiling is the least effective overall, also tends to be the least pleasing to taste. You could argue the drop in flavour is linked to the dropped mineral and vitamin content (theoretically).
I roast my brocoli, I have 0 concern about a little char because ultimately the “carcinogen” issue is assuming you’re essentially only consuming the one compound and not in the context of a whole diet. It’s likely that the minor char or blackened piece will be mitigated by the fibre of the diet and water. Not to mention that your diet should have plenty of vitamins which will also mitigate this issue with ease.
Steaming and sauté tent to retain the most nutrients because they use lower heat. And yes, you can add oil or butter to the steamed vegetables after cooking to add fat. Another method is steam-sauté- steam for a few minutes and then add fat, quickly sauté to finish (in the same pan). This works well for tougher veggies like broccoli.
My understanding of food chemistry is that beneficial compounds in vegetables differs widely between raw, cooked, and for aromatic stuff like onions and garlic, being left sitting for a while and then cooked.
All seem to offer different benefits. So we should eat raw and steamed. Roasting and frying veggies is nice too, but mind the oil, high temperatures and salt.
Steaming definitely seems to be the gentlest way of cooking healthy stuff, and after steaming, I realized my mom was destroying the flavour of carrots and broccoli and potatoes, etc all those years. All this stuff is so much more tasty with steaming, so it surely is also keeping a lot of the goodness too?
My humble opinion.
A study by Buratti et al (2020) showed that different cooking methods brought different results in terms of nutrient retention. For example, boiling incurred great losses in vitamin c and phenols conc. Steaming can cause loss in vitamin c BUT increased retention of phenolics and carotenoids. Microwaving resulted in minor vitamin c changes and maintained phytochemical conc.
They also mentioned that shorter cooking times better preserved or even enhanced nutritional quality; so you might wanna consider that when cooking.
Another study by Lee et al (2018) showed differences in nutrition content and retention pf different cooking methods; but they also mentioned that it depends on the type of vegetables you use and it doesn’t produce similar results. For example, in terms of vit K, microwaving crown daisy and mallow incurred great loss while spinach had the least loss.
Basically, there’s no perfect or ‘best’ cooking method in terms of nutrient retention as it can result in different values; and it also depends on the type of vegetables you use. The reason they say steaming is one of the healthiest method (as suppose to blanching or boiling), is because it has the most minimal nutrient loss (9-15%; as compared to boiling of 25-35%) especially water-soluble vitamins since they are heat and water sensitive.
In terms of oils, they are fine to use as long as you use those that are MUFA or PUFA sources and you don’t reuse them. Examples include canola oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, and olive oil. It also helps in absorbing fat-soluble vitamins better that are found in vegetables (eg carrots with beta carotene).
Regardless of the nutrient values that you incur from cooking vegetables, the best way to ensure you achieve your daily nutrient goal is eating meals that follow balance (correct proportions and right amounts of food), moderation (not eating certain food sources excessively), and variety (eating as many different types of food to get all nutrients possible).
Hope this helps!
I usually lightly oil the pan before steaming regardless.
The idea behind steaming being healthier is nutrients can leech out into the water (much like tea or broth) and if you do that and pour out the water thats wasted nutrients. So if by the end of your steaming theres little to no water then all those nutrients would still be there.
Steaming is objectively better than boiling for nutrition. The nuance comes in from how much/hot should you cook veggies, what veggies to cook, and maybe what things you cook together.
Sorry i dont have sources for this one, but hopefully this explanation makes some intuitive sense.
I don’t think there is something as “healthiest”. Cooking them can break down some nutrients, but in other ways makes the nutrients makes them more available.
I don’t have sources, but I remember from a decent source that different vegetables has different benefits from being cooked differently.
So your best bet is to just use a variety of cooking methods. Also the worst cooking method you love to eat is better than the best/healthiest if you hate.
What is “healthy”? Are you trying to lose weight to get into a healthy weight range? Are you trying to maximize vitamin absorption? Are you trying to relieve constipation? These would all have different answers.
Sauteing is often best, assuming you keep them from overcooking. Basically go for al dente. Properly prepping food is important for numerous reasons, a big one being consistency and even cooking.
Cooking starchy foods with lipids forms a special resistive starch, RS5, which is beneficial for multiple reasons relating to gut/microbiotia health:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.0c08187#
Further:
> Sautéing significantly improved in vitro bile acid binding of mustard greens, kale, broccoli, cabbage and green bell pepper compared with steaming, boiling or raw (uncooked). Collard greens exhibited significantly higher bile acid binding by steaming compared with sautéing, boiling or raw. Data suggest that the cooking method with most heath promoting potential for mustard greens, kale, broccoli, cabbage and green bell pepper should be sautéing. Steaming should be used for collard greens as the cooking method. These green/leafy vegetables, when consumed regularly after sautéing, would promote a healthy lifestyle and have the potential to lower the risk of premature degenerative diseases
A review on bile acid binding:
https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/1686/1698
Steamed was highly variable. Sometimes worse than microwaved. Sauted is consistently great and sometimes the best.
All things considered, sauteing seems to edge out steamed. But steaming can be great. In any case, you want al dente, not mush!
Best way to eat them, slathered in avocado oil or your non industrial seed oil of choice then roasted in the oven with salt and your seasonings of choice. Healthiest way, doesn’t exist. There are pros and cons of eating anything, prepared any variety of ways, at any given time. You gotta eat to live, don’t focus on perfect just focus on eating the right kinds of foods however you most enjoy them