5 Tips for Optimum Nutrition (It’s How You Prep and Store!)

If you read Part 1 of this blog about Eating Wild at the Supermarket, then you know that:

Not all fruits and vegetables are created equal. 

Most of the fruits and vegetables available today are grown, harvested and distributed by large-scale industrial systems. This means that our modern produce is largely grown in depleted, nutrient deficient soil, cultivated for long distance transportation and extended shelf life–not for optimal nutrition.  The dramatic rise in health issues such as cancer, obesity, adult and childhood diabetes, metabolic diseases, immunity and neurological disorders in the last half-century appear as evidence of this phenomenon.

It would be great if we could all just pick up our gathering basket and forage through the woods like our ancestors, but obviously that’s not a real solution for this widespread problem. The good news is, we have options! As Jo Robinson explains in her book, Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health, we can maximize nutritional content by simply shopping smarter at the grocery store and following these tips once we get home with the produce.

5 Easy Tips for Optimal Nutrition/ How to Prep and Store

1. Tearing Romaine and Iceberg lettuce the day before you eat it quadruples its antioxidant content.
2. The healing properties of garlic can be maximized by slicing, chopping, mashing, or pressing it and then letting it rest for a full 10 minutes before cooking.
3. Cooking potatoes and then chilling them for about 24 hours before you eat them (even if you reheat them) turns a high-glycemic vegetable into a low- or moderate-glycemic vegetable. This means it causes less of a blood sugar spike. You might be surprised to hear that combining potatoes with oil (French fry alert!) helps keep them from disrupting your metabolism.
4. Storing broccoli wrapped in a plastic bag with tiny pinpricks in it will give you up to 125 percent more antioxidants than if you had stored the broccoli loosely wrapped or in a tightly sealed bag.
5. Thawing frozen berries in the microwave preserves twice as many antioxidants and more vitamin C than thawing them on the counter or inside your refrigerator.

Read more in Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health, by Jo Robinson.

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