Cooking carrots whole before chopping them up boosts their anti-cancer properties by 25 percent, researchers say. Leaving the vegetable intact prevents valuable nutrients from being easily washed away into the water, claim scientists.
As an added bonus, boiling unchopped carrots also makes them taste better, they said. They can then be chopped up once cooked without loss of nutrients.
Carrots have long been prized for their health benefits, especially their vitamin and fiber content. They contain huge amounts of carotenoids which are converted into vitamin A in the body.
They are also an excellent source of the anti-cancer compound falcarinol.
In a previous study, Dr. Kirsten Brandt found rats fed on a diet containing carrots or isolated falcarinol were a third less likely to develop full-scale tumors than those which were not.
Now, Dr. Brandt and researcher Ahlam Rashed, from Newcastle’s school of agriculture, food and rural development, have gone further. They found that carrots boiled before they were cut contained 25 percent more falcarinol than those that were chopped up first.
Cut carrots have a higher surface area in contact with the water, resulting in greater loss of nutrients compared with boiling them whole.
The heat softens the cell walls in the vegetable, allowing vitamins and falcarinol to leach out.
Dr. Brandt said: ‘The great thing about this is it’s a simple way for people to increase their uptake of a compound we know is good for you. All you need is a bigger saucepan.’
Naturally occurring sugars responsible for giving the carrot its distinctively sweet flavor was also found in higher concentrations in carrots that had been cooked whole – meaning the vegetable tastes better.
The team also carried out a taste test on almost 100 volunteers comparing carrots boiled before being cut and some that were cut up first.
More than 80 percent said that carrots cooked whole tasted much better. Independent nutritionist Dr. Carrie Ruxton said ‘This is good news as boiling them whole appears to help them keep more of the nutrients.
‘This could apply to other vegetables, such as parsnips which are from the same family and have a roughly similar size and texture.’ Whether to peel the vegetables is largely a matter of personal taste, she said.
‘It’s a good idea to scrub potatoes rather than peel them because all the vitamin C is under the skin, but with vegetables that contain more uniformly distributed nutrients it shouldn’t be that important.’ However, she added that probably the best way to eat carrots is raw.
Conclusion
The medical properties of carrots – including the boost they provide to night vision, which led to them being fed to RAF pilots during the second world war – can be enhanced by the way in which they are cooked, researchers say.
Food chemists at Newcastle University have found that boiling the vegetables whole rather than slicing them up increases the supply of healthy ingredients by a quarter.
Dicing carrots – still the commonest way of cooking them in Britain – resulted in the loss of 25% of their compound falcarinol, a series of experiments using laboratory rats revealed.
The naturally occurring sugars have anti-cancer properties and also give carrots their slightly sweet taste.
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