I always eat whatever thing in the fridge is closest to spoiled to ensure I waste nothing. And it’s a race because food is often already on the edge when I bring it home, to prevent waste and also save money (as it gets marked down because of the age).
I found out a friend does the opposite. She eats the freshest veg she has because she says vitimins deplete as the veg ages. She wants to maximise her nutrition.
Is freshness really significant for vitamins? Someone in my family does the same thing. Always eats the freshest food. And as a consequence she is frequently tossing food that lost the competition to be eaten early.
IMO it’s a waste of time and money to optimize for vitamins unless you took a blood test, and found out about specific deficiencies.
There are way too many kinds of vitamins and placebo involved to be able to guess what specific vegies, if any, you need to minmax for your health.
Nutrition doesnt generally need to be minmaxed; if youre eating a fairly balanced, varied diet and not having nutritional problems or health problems that could be contributed to by nutrition I wouldn’t really worry about it
You can eat things before they start to go bad and still get valuable nutrition out of them
Nutrition doesnt generally need to be minmaxed;
That may be true superficially but some ppl have an interest in minimising waste. On the one hand, we want to minimise food waste. But if that leads to consuming more food to get the needed nutrition we may still be failing to minimise waste as we try to minimise waste. So consider these two scenarios:
- Bob eats 1 freshly picked bell pepper. But this habit led to throwing 1 bell pepper away because he routinely eats the freshest option.
- Alice, who tries to minimise food waste only has near-spoiled bell peppers. So she eats 2 bell peppers as they lost nutrition.
In both cases 1 bell pepper was wasted. It’s oversimplified¹ in order to convey the problem. Alice may not be consciously choosing to eat more but when living the zerowaste lifestyle her body naturally demands bigger portions (we might hypothesize).
¹ No idea if 50% nutrition is lost in aging from freshest to near ruin. It’s arbitrary for the sake of the example…
Note from after writing: you can probably skip to the final paragraph, I’m just bad at being succinct. Leaving the rest there for explanation and continuity
Yeah I think the problem is that the bulk of nutrition does not degrade at all. To my understanding degradation just happens to micronutrients, and only the volatile ones which are generally vitamins. Not minerals, and the carbs and fiber of a bell pepper don’t degrade at all either- carbs being the macro that bell peppers meaningfully contribute to. Your macronutrients, as the name would suggest are the vast majority of your needed intake and shouldn’t degrade at all.
So you only end up needing to eat more food to make up for degredation if you have a vitamin deficient diet as a product of waiting until things are less fresh. You only need to worry about vitamin intake if youre having problems that are likely explainable by a vitamin deficiency or have labs saying you have a deficiency and your doctor thinks you should be doing something about it (lab values can be affected by lots of things, and sometimes chasing things like vitamin levels when you don’t have any specific health problems you’re trying to adress causes unforseen issues. Don’t fix what isnt broken, you generally only need to worry about things if theres an issue that may be caused by a deficiency, and then you test for that deficiency and you have it.)
You do need micronutrients, but as long as youre eating a reasonably healthy varied diet you should be getting plenty, and it really should be fine to eat veggies past peak freshness even if you’d get more vitamins otherwise. If you don’t have a vitamin deficiency its really not something to stress over.
If youre going to optimize something about your health make it eating more whole foods, which would reduce any possible likelihood of vitamin deficiencies anyway.
If your question is purely about waste rather than health, priotize avoiding macro-nutrient waste rather than micro-nutrient, as wasted macros more meaningfully guarantee you will need to eat more food to make up for lost nutrition and calories, where vitamins do not unless you’re deficient and its causing problems.
Sorry, that last paragraph probably could have been the whole answer but I’m really long-winded lol
Pretty sure frozen will always be the most nutritious, most vitamins freeze well and don’t deteriorate while frozen.
I think C degrades slightly during freezing, but like, that’s a really easy one to get. Unless you’re going on an extended voyage into the Arctic and need to stave off scurvy, you’ll be fine losing a little bit of C. Everything else preserves pretty well.
I can’t imagine that the amount of vitamins lost would be so great as to justify throwing away food. Or maybe I’m just poor. The only food I can afford to throw away is food that would definitely make me sick if I ate it.
Just don’t buy more than you can reasonably eat and it really isn’t going to matter
Well I have no problem stuffing my face. If I had a robot chef there would be no problem at all. But anticipating my future motivation to prepare the food is where it gets dicey.
I’m familiar with this problem and it still happens sometimes. I’ve partially solved it by buying groceries more frequently, and by cooking stuff the day I bought it, even if it’s for eating it one or two days after. Some foods I’ve replaced, like freezer spinach instead of fresh or pots of yoghurt smaller than a kilogram.
That’s just to throw out less, the whole vitamin thing seems pointless if you don’t have deficiencies.
generally, you have to be avoiding particular vitamins / minerals for an extended period to end up with a deficiency. (b12 is maybe an extreme example, but a person could have liver stores of b12 that can last them years of no b12 intake before developing a deficiency!)
so to “maximise nutrition”, it’s more important to put the emphasis on a varied diet, rather than on eating the freshest of fresh foods.
that could change if you have specific problems with absorbing particular vitamins or minerals, but if that’s not the case, i’d say throwing away edible food is being overly cautious.
editing to add: happy cake day, activistPnk!
i’d say throwing away edible food is being overly cautious.
That’s not really what’s happening. People who eat the freshest food first don’t toss edible food. They still wait until it’s rotten before tossing. It’s just that when you eat the freshest food first, more food ends up reaching the spoiled state.
editing to add: happy cake day, activistPnk!
I’m afraid it’s a fake cake day to throw off the doxxers (who now know that I was born on one of the other 364 days).
ahh, fair. either way, there’s still good nutritional value to be had out of making a big stew / soup / etc out of veggies before they go stale!
and happy fake day in that case, lol 🍰
Smart shopping and prompt consumption of leftovers would probably satisfy both camps? Ex. I eat leftovers from last night’s dinner for lunch the next day. Also veggies and whatnot can last a day or a few. They don’t tank in value as fast as cars after they’re driven off the lot 😅
Smart shopping
Not exactly sure what this implies. I buy edgy food which was slow to move off the shelf so the price gets cut down in order to make it move. It’s cheap¹ and mitigates food waste outside my house. If by smart shopping you mean to buy the freshest food, well then that would prioritise nutrition over rescuing local food from waste. Which is smart is not obvious to me.
My kitchen becomes like a ER triage to eat food before it spoils. And sometimes I have to do surgery and make sculptures. That is, carving decayed parts out of partially ruined food. It’s food in its least nutritional state, but there is still something to be said for training your immune system.
Ex. I eat leftovers from last night’s dinner for lunch the next day.
Leftovers the next day risks giving you more of the same nutrition you still have traversing your body from the previous meal. So I deliberately skip a day or two on leftovers to ensure the nutrients are replenished when they are needed more (which is after they left the system). Leftovers are also less urgent because the cooking kills the baddies and enables the spoilage clock to be reset.
¹ Since the edgy food is generally ½-off, it’s fair to say I can buy twice as much for the same price. I don’t really know if that more or less than compensates for the age-induced decline of vitamins.
According ro research inspired by one of the scientists kids, nutrients and vitamins rise when exposed to sunlight, and deteriorate when in a dark fridge.
According ro research inspired by one of the scientists kids, nutrients and vitamins rise when exposed to sunlight, and deteriorate when in a dark fridge.
I appreciate the link but I didn’t quite catch the nutrition analysis. They did not seem to state outright that nutrients rise, though they say the daylit food has more anti-carcinogens. Are you infering that the tissue loss implies a loss of nutrition?
There was a finding in research a couple decades ago on mushrooms, which accumulate vitamin E or D under sunlight. I forgot which but it the same vitamin we directly get from sun exposure.
But then we must work out how to exploit this knowledge. Mushrooms need to be refrigerated. Should they be in a fridge with a glass door? Or does the glass block most of the UV which is likely the key ingredient anyway? I keep them in a dark fridge but if insects are not around I will take them out of the fridge in the morning so they get sunlight in their final day.
Potatoes need to be kept in darkness to slow sprouting. But I wonder if I should treat them like mushrooms and give them a final day or two of light.
It wasnt the link i was looking for. I read an norwegian article a few years ago. What they ended up with was that light did affect. This also goes for taste imo
It’s probably true, some vitamins might bget lost, but likely not super significant.
