Eat the rainbow!

But what does it mean? It is really just a fancy way to say you should eat a balanced diet, and that you should buy every color fruit or vegetable available at your local market?

Fruits and vegetables get their colors (and other unique characteristics like smell, texture, etc) from various phytochemicals. Each phytochemical has its own set nutrients. Since the phytochemicals that make something red are different from the phytochemicals that make something green, the nutrients, and health benfits, of those two plants are going to be different. Simply said, you can’t get the same vitamins and minerals from red fruits that you can get from green vegetables. This is why you should eat the rainbow.

Unlike our vision, which we can sum up with a tidy 7 colors and the ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) slogan, the amount of phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, and nutritional elements and metals that exist is staggering. It would almost be silly to categorize produce solely on color, so, that’s what I’ve done here! There are many vitamins, nutrients and health benefits that can be found in a majority of one color of produce, so it’s worth looking at anyway.

Preserving Nutrients

First, let’s look at the factors that affect the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables, and more importantly, what we can do to ensure we’re getting the most nutrient bang for our buck.

Cooking Time

There are numerous factors than can affect the nutrition of a particular fruit or vegetable, the most impactful often being cooking method and time. I’ve included general guidelines for the amount of cooking a particular fruit or vegetable can sustain before it turns into an unappetizing, nutrient-void puddle in the graphic. As a general rule though, the less cooking time the better, but this isn’t always true, especially for vegetables like broccoli, or fruit like tomatoes.

Cooked versus Raw: As for the whole raw vegetable myth, raw vegans will go as far as telling you that by cooking vegetables or fruits at all, you are removing most of the nutrients and making them useless. This just isn’t true. In fact, many nutrients found in produce only become readily absorbed by the body after they’ve been broken down in the cooking process (cooking softens and breaks down cell walls making the nutrients more readily accessible).

Also, some vitamins and minerals have a natural tendency to dissipate quicker than others. Vitamin C is lost to processing, cooking, and reheating much quicker than others such as zinc.
Cooking Methods

Cooking time is not the only factor that can suck nutrients from produce. The cooking method used also has an effect. Some of the most common methods used for cooking vegetables (boiling, simmering, poaching, and blanching) are also the most likely to leech the most nutrients out of the fruit or vegetable. Notice a trend in these methods? They’re all wet cooking methods, meaning they use water, particularly submersion in water. Steaming however, another wet cooking method, is not as harmful to your nutrient intake. If you want the healthiest form of cooking, you should stick to steaming. I on the other hand shall stick to frying my vegetables in lots and lots of butter – because dairy is healthy, right?
Freshness

The fresher the vegetable or fruit is, the more nutrients it will have. The longer produce sits out, the more likely it has lost a lot of its healthy vitamins. In fact, many nutritionists will suggest eating fruits and vegetables within a week of picking.

Fresh versus Frozen: Fresh vegetables in the produce section are more nutritious than frozen, right? Nope, at least not always. The time between picking and freezing is likely shorter than the time between picking and getting the produce to the store, and eventually into your mouth.
Vibrancy

Specific colors and phytochemicals aside, some nutritionists suggest opting for the most vibrant fruit or vegetables, as the more saturated or bright produce look, the more likely it is to contain more phytochemicals and thus more nutrients.
Eat it All

Eat the skin! Eat everything! People freakout when they find out I eat the skin on kiwi but just about every part of produce we can buy is edible (there are obvious exceptions so please don’t eat a rhubarb leaf or apple seeds and then come yell at me – both are poisonous if you didn’t know). So stop peeling your potatoes, stop cutting the skin off an apple.