Improve Your Health With Vegetables

By Rajeev Sharma

Nature has provided mankind with a gamut of fruits, vegetables, dairy products and other sources to maintain a healthy lifestyle. These natural sources of food are rich in vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates and other essential nutrients. Moreover, they have numerous unexplored healing powers. Through this series, we have made a sincere attempt to unfold the various benefits of these foods. You will find a cure for every big or small disease in this invaluable series, and will discover what treasure nature holds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diamond Books
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9788128823022

Book preview

VEGETABLES: SOME FACTS

VEGETABLES

Vegetables are the natural sources of essential and valuable nutrients. They help the body to endure, in repairing its defective metabolism, in repairing tissues and in building up energy. They are rich in vitamins, minerals, roughage and cleansing process. Nature has in its lap, variety of vegetables that are important and essential factors to various needs of human body. Even animals live and thrive on vegetables and herbs to feed and cure themselves. For every living being nature has plenty of variety to offer. They are available in the form of seed, roots, stems, leaves and fruits. Group of vitamin B-complex, iron, protein, carbohydrates can be found in plenty from various vegetables. But calcium and vitamin E are quite low in them.

How to use vegetables

All leafy and green vegetables are essential part of our diet and to derive optimum benefits, they should be used in their raw fresh form, as is done in case of preparing salads. For preparing a nutritious and tasty salad, it is essential that they should be green, fresh, leafy, dry and crisp, so as to satisfy our taste buds and also to build up body’s resistance, in addition to supplying essential nutrients. In case, vegetables are required to be cooked (which should be avoided, as far as possible) following points, if kept in mind, will go a long way in the preservation of their nutrients values.

Vegetables should always be used fresh and washed thoroughly. After washing them properly in water, they should be cut into large pieces, they should not be washed again, as it would take away all their nutrient values.

Avoid frying or cooking vegetables with vegetable ghee, as cooking and heating destroy their food values.

It is advisable to boil, instead of deep frying or cooking the cut vegetables.

Use only that quantity of water, which will suffice to cover the vegetables, because the more the water the more the time consumed for softening or for reducing them into pulp. Certain vegetables like spinach, leafy vegetables and tomatoes, have enough of natural water, hence there is no need to add any extra amount of water to them for cooking.

Climatic change and exposures should not affect quality of vegetables. Keeping the vegetables in the refrigerators is not recommended. Purchase the vegetable that could suffice for one or two meal servings. Always purchase fresh vegetables.

Vegetables should be boiled to the extent that their natural colour and flavour remains intact.

Vegetables after been cooked, should always be served fresh and hot. Fringe and cooked vegetables do lose most of their food value and taste.

As far as possible, vegetables should be steam boiled in their natural juices (water) on very slow fire and after cooking, do not throw (away) or drain away their water, thus allowing the vegetables to use their own natural water or juice.

Unless the skin of a vegetable is too hard to be chewed, it should not be separated/peeled off.

For steaming/boiling purpose, never use any aluminium utensil, as aluminium is a soft metal and is amenable to bad effect of alkalis and food acid, as such powerful astringent properties of aluminium harm immensely soft lining of the stomach, causing various digestive disorders.

Normally, a person taking around 300 gms of vegetables per day would stay in sound health. Out of this 120 gms should be in the form of leafy vegetables, about 90—100 gms in the form of ladyfingers, brinjals etc., and the rest of 90 gms in the form of tubers and roots.

Nutritional, Therapeutic and Medicinal uses Vitamins in Vegetables

Vitamin A is essential for health of skin, better eyesight, for avoiding or delaying night blindness and for providing a protective shield against infections to minimize the risk of catching cold. It is, thus, prophylactic for various digestive skin, eye, and respiratory tract infections. Vitamin A is found in plenty in papaya, carrots, leafy