Tag Archive for: vitamins

Yes, the Nutrients Are There

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My question is whether you get any nutrients besides sugar and fat from those marshmallow-covered yams or the green beans swimming in condensed mushroom soup and topped with fried onions from a can. The research on cooking techniques and retention of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients in vegetables and fruits is not extensive but overall, the answer is yes. Here’s a synopsis of what I found.

Cooking and Nutrients

The vitamin that seems to be lost regardless of whether it’s boiled, microwaved, or sauteed is vitamin C. Microwaving seems to preserve the most nutrients, but close to 90% of vitamin C is lost.

For some nutrients, such as beta-carotene and other carotenoids, starting with fresh vegetables as opposed to frozen seems to help retain nutrients. The amounts of carotenoids in carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and yams seem to increase when they are cooked. The same may be true in greens such as spinach and collard greens. Adding bacon doesn’t appear to cause any issues. Using nuts and fruit to make the veggies more attractive can add nutrients as well; for added color and texture, we added slivered almonds and pomegranate seeds to the brussels sprouts with parmesan—yum!

Casseroles may provide the best cooking style when appropriate. Whatever minerals leech out of the vegetables or fruits will be retained in the liquid of the casserole.

Surprise Finding

Cooking may reduce the amount of pesticide residues in vegetables. It’s nice to know that blanching, boiling and even stir frying may decrease residues by 10–80%. The research didn’t look at the liquid used for blanching or boiling, so we don’t know whether it’s a chemical change in the structure of the pesticide or it just leaches it out. Still, it was a welcome surprise.

The Bottom Line

Traditional holiday foods do retain beneficial nutrients. They can’t offset all the fat and sugar that were added, but we’re getting some of the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients the foods contain. To me, the real lesson is that the way the food is prepared may help you eat more vegetables and fruit. Steamed green beans? Yecch. But covered in a sauce? Maybe that will help get more vegetables into your picky eaters. As long as we control the amount and the frequency, we can feel good about eating holiday foods all year long.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. Food Sci Biotechnol. 2017 Dec 12;27(2):333-342
2. Nutr Bull. 2022 Dec;47(4):538-562.  doi: 10.1111/nbu.12584.
3. Foods. 2022 May 18;11(10):1463. 

Do You Need a Fruit-and-Vegetable Concentrate?

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Vegetable-concentrate and fruit-concentrate products are popular now, judging by the number of ads on TV and the web; the implication is that they can replace real fruits and vegetables in the diet.

For the fruit concentrate, manufacturers remove all the fiber and water, yielding concentrates from various fruits and phytonutrient blends plus aloe vera. The supplements include 2,000 mg per serving with 17 ingredients; that works out to 120 mg per ingredient if equally divided. Are those amounts significant, especially after removing the fiber and water? Hard to say without a lot of research on each nutrient to find the effective amount, both individually and combined; for example, we don’t know if there’s an interaction between the nutrients that affects absorption and utilization.

One more type of concentrate would be single-nutrient supplements, such as a specific type of curcuminoids from a certain species of turmeric. Manufacturing is not my area; it takes some hard-core chemistry to figure out how to get the nutrient you want.

Here’s an example: curcumin is extracted from the dried root of the rhizome Curcuma longa. After drying, the process of extraction requires the raw material to be ground into powder and washed with a solvent that selectively extracts coloring matter, the curcuminoids, which then can be put into supplement form. Might there be some vitamins and minerals remaining? Probably, but that isn’t the point of the supplement. The curcuminoids are.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, our bodies need the fiber and water from plants to feed our microbiome. That’s why these types of products complement the vegetables and fruits you’re supposed to be eating—they don’t replace them.

I think the best way to get the best of both worlds is eating the five to ten servings of fruits and vegetables you’re supposed to eat, plus taking a multivitamin-multimineral with plant concentrates as insurance to make sure you get all the basic nutrients. If you know you’re not going to be eating as you should for a while, like an accountant working 14-hour days at tax time or a student cramming for finals, a fruit-and-vegetable concentrate might be a good addition. Then add specific concentrate-phytonutrient blends you may be missing in your diet; for example, if you hate mushrooms, take a mushroom-blend supplement. Now you’ve got all your bases covered.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agns/pdf/jecfa/cta/61/Curcumin.pdf

Vitamins and Minerals in Supplements

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I got an interesting question last week about a supplement that contained a blend of fruit and vegetable concentrates: vitamins and minerals aren’t included on the label, so are they in there? The answer is probably. It all comes down to the purpose of the supplement.

A concentrate is typically the entire vegetable or fruit with the water removed by a dehydration process; whatever is in the plant will be in the concentrate. You could liken this to drying a fresh herb to use as a spice. A more sophisticated process is to remove some of the fiber as well; that would remove solids, but some vitamins and minerals could remain.

Another variation is if a company were to focus on a phytonutrient blend, such as the polyphenols and hesperidin from citrus fruit. They would standardize the supplement to the amounts of those phytonutrients but wouldn’t be concerned about vitamins or minerals unless they met a percentage of the RDA.

There is still more precision in concentrate and phytonutrient supplements, and we’ll talk about them on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

2020 Supplement Facts Labels

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Supplement Facts labels can be confusing to say the least. How much of each substance is in a product? Is the source of the supplement natural or synthetic? And what exactly is an International Unit (IU) anyway? I’ve noticed that supplement labels have eliminated IUs and replaced them with weights in milligrams (mg) and micrograms (mcg). What’s going on?

In 2016, the FDA modified the rules for indicating label amounts and gave companies until January 1, 2020, to comply. The RDAs were changing and they wanted to standardize the units of measurement. The IU represented the biological activity of the vitamin, but the source of the vitamin could impact the actual amount of the vitamin in the supplement and thus, the biological activity.

For example, if a product contains natural vitamin E, to find out the mg, the IU would be multiplied by 0.67; but if it was synthetic vitamin E, it would be multiplied by 0.45. That means that a label that indicated 100 IU would now say 67 mg if it were natural vitamin E but 45 mg if it were synthetic. The label would also have to give the form of the vitamin.

The changes impact most of the fat-soluble vitamins and phytonutrients. It’s going to take time to get used to it and understand it, but I see it as a positive move that will help us all understand supplements better.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: http://bit.ly/2HSQ1Jm

Supplements: Helpful or Harmful?

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About a week ago when a press release about a study published in the Journal of American Academy of Cardiology stated that vitamins and minerals don’t seem to help the health of those people who use them; they should stick to getting nutrients from the food they eat. As you can imagine, I got questions from many readers.

For those of us who use dietary supplements, have we been wasting our money? Or maybe as part of the study showed, we’re doing ourselves harm? Don’t throw out your supplements just yet.

The study was a meta-analysis that examined randomized controlled trials (RCT) since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) Recommendations for Dietary Supplements was published in 2012. They examined RCTs that used multivitamins, vitamins and minerals, and antioxidants to determine their affect on health variables related to cardiovascular disease and overall mortality.

Was the study done well? Yes and no. They included RCTs that examined the use of specific supplements and health outcomes. The problem is that they didn’t examine the quality of the supplements used in those studies. That’s a significant problem but not the only one. More on this Saturday. Until then, regardless of the headlines, take your supplements if you know why you’re taking them.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

References: Jenkins, D.J.A. et al. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2018;71(22):2570–84.