Facts About Vitamins - Are Drug Store Vitamins Worth Buying? Part 2
Drug store vitamins are excellent supplements but poor substitutes for food. Concentrated vitamins are useful in cases of existing or potential deficiencies. It is, for instance, usually good protection for anyone on a. reducing diet to supplement his food with small quantities of concentrated Vitamin A; additional B vitamins may also be helpful. It should always be remembered, however, that if you are getting all the vitamins you can use, additional vitamins will simply be excreted and wasted.
As long as you get sufficient vitamins, there is no need to exclude from your diet other foods that may be poor in vitamins; such foods may provide innumerable other valuable elements. The vitamin content of some foods often varies according to growing conditions, season of the year, and other factors..
Now you see how easy it is to be sure you are getting your vitamins. A cup of orange juice a day for Vitamin C, a pork chop for Vitamin Bi, a serving of greens for Vitamin A, a bit of liver for riboflavin—any one of these will assure you of your basic intake of these particular vitamins.
Yet the only vitamins that really go to work for you are those that reach the platter through the kindness of the cook. Sunshine travels some 90,000,000 miles to make plant growth possible. Animals work industriously to store vitamins in meat and dairy products. And then, a dozen feet from the dining-room table, enormous quantities of vitamins come to an untimely end on the kitchen stove. Many of them are carried of in steam from over boiled foods so that, in theory, it would be possible to scrape a square meal off the ceiling of an old kitchen.
There is nothing complicated about preserving vitamins in cooking. A basic principle is simplicity. Fancy victuals that go through several cooking processes before they reach the table (even so common a procedure as boiling potatoes and then frying them) lose some of their vitamins in each operation.
Here are simple rules for preserving vitamins in your food:
Use a minimum amount of cooking water.
Cook in covered vessels for as short a time as possible.
Avoid stirring.
Never add baking soda.
Start vegetables in hot water.
Serve the cooking liquids in soups.
Handle fruits and vegetables as little as possible.
Use a brush to clean vegetables rather than a knife to scrape them.
Cook in their natural state (i.e., potatoes in jackets)
as far as practicable.
Some vitamins are more temperamental than others. Vitamin C is the flightiest prima donna of the lot. It runs off and dissolves itself in cooking liquids when it gets
a chance. It is a heat-hater with a tender skin and it resents rough handling. Shredding, cutting, and dicing of fruits and vegetables can result in severe losses of Vitamin C. To preserve it, conduct these manipulations just before serving.
Hope this gets you on you way to taking advantage of natural vitamins.
