Antioxidant Content: How To Recognize It and How To Keep It!
By Lalitha Thomas

The following lists will assist you in choosing foods with the highest antioxidant content, and preparing that food so that the antioxidant content is preserved as much as possible.

Choosing Great Food:

1. Go for Color. Eat a large variety of vibrant colors and right away you can know that you are expanding your phytochemical/antioxidant intake.
Examples of good color choices are: red onions over white; red grapes over green or white; dark green leafy vegetables; like Spinach, Sprouts, parsley, and leaf lettuces over the watery-green stuff such as iceberg lettuce and pink Grapefruit over the lighter varieties.

2. Use fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, which have higher nutrient and antioxidant activity than canned, processed, sweetened or cooked selections. Choose fresh unrefined oils such as Flax oil or extra virgin oil over the commonly available vegetable oil mixtures.

3. Choose fresh raw nuts and seeds over the roasted and salted ones.

4. Choose raw or lightly cooked vegetables over heavily cooked, canned, or processed one.

Preserving Top Antioxidant Content in Food:

1. Avoid wilted produce and do not buy pre-cut produce.

2. Don't trim or discard the highly useful and edible skins, outer leaves, etc. Eat them as part of the dish you are preparing. Exceptions to this are
non-organic produce which cannot be cleaned of offending chemical coatings, such as the skins of waxed apples and cucumbers. I make case-by-case judgments on this "to trim-or-not-to-trim question" with non-organic produce depending on how effective I think my cleaning methods have been and how offending some of the coatings are. Even so, most waxed coatings get trimmed off.

3. Don't cook foods with the "swimming in water" methods. Use as little water as needed, or use a steamer basket which holds foods up out of the
water, thereby keeping the nutrients in the food instead of in the cooking water, which is often thrown away. Add any leftover cooking water back to the food whenever possible. Antioxidants will be present in it!

4. Avoid excessive heat in cooking. Long boiling, or other extended cooking, or exposing foods to flame or smoke can damage antioxidants. DO
NOT FRY FOODS.

5. Use syrups or liquids that result from thawing frozen foods.

6. Do not refrigerate once-cooked foods for more than a day, and always store them in air-tight containers.

7. Try not to reheat once-cooked fruit or vegetable dishes.

8. Avoid keeping foods warm for more than thirty minutes before you serve them, as antioxidants are being lost increasingly with this passage of time.

9. Do not hold fresh produce in your refrigerator for more than a few days, and certainly not longer than a week. Buying frozen fruits and vegetables is a better choice if you think you won't consume the fresh produce within a few days of purchase.

For the full scoop about antioxidants refer to Dr. Kenneth Cooper's Antioxidant revolution and Humbart Santillo's Intuitive Eating.