Fresh Vegetables: Can Cutting Affect Their Nutritional Value?

Some scientists treat slicing, reducing, and cutting of fresh vegetables as actions that can damage the cells of the plants and can start out damage-based responses in the plant cells.

As a normal rule, researchers treat vegetable cutting as a type of stress that’s placed on the vegetables, much like different varieties of stress like heat and cold.

After reviewing a couple of food studies, we now have several ideas about the slicing and cutting of fresh vegetables:

The Type of Knife Used

Studies show that if you are making use of a knife to cut your fresh greens, a dull knife can cause unwanted injury that you could restrict with the use of a sharp knife.

With a blunt blade, you are likely to increase the amount of electrolyte leakage from your veggies and unpleasant odors.

With a sharp blade you might cut back the risk of bacterial growth and the danger of wilting and softening. You can get health advantages from your chopped vegetables when chopping with a sharp versus dull blade.

Cut Size

Discoloration, taste and texture loss, dehydration, and nutrient loss generally advances as the cut vegetable portions get smaller and smaller.

For example, shredded lettuce or shredded cabbage can bring more risks than coarsely chopped lettuce or coarsely chopped cabbage.

Vegetable shredding means a shorter shelf life. Nonetheless, this basic principle does not mean that your veggies should not be shredded. When shredded veggies are marinated or fermented, there could also be dietary advantages to shredding.

The Time Eaten

As a rule, the finely you shred or chop your vegetables, the faster they should be eaten. For example, shredding lettuce within one hour of serving a salad could expand your health advantages when compared to shredding lettuce 2 to 3 hours earlier than the salad is consumed.

Respiration

Probably the most changes involved with vegetable chopping are related to respiratory rate. Respiration includes the breakdown of sugars in vegetables by consumption of oxygen and the discharge of carbon dioxide.

Respiration is not a bad idea it reflects the effective vitality of vegetation and the fact that greens remain partly alive, even after we have harvested them. However, the rapid the respiration, the better the chance of a vegetable spoiling over a shorter interval of time.

Interestingly, we now have a few studies where the antioxidant ability of veggies has been shown to increase when those vegetables are cut and chopped. While these results make it sound as if you can get more health advantages from cut versus whole vegetable, we don’t consider that this conclusion is right.

When vegetables are cut, they do respond to this damage by increasing the number of antioxidants. Some examples of the phenols include jasmonic acid, systemin, and salicylic acid.

Nonetheless, while these antioxidants are also extended, other antioxidants likevitamin C and carotenoids could also be lost. So,even though the whole variety of antioxidants could also be multiplied because of an increase within the number of wound-based molecules, our antioxidant health advantages are probably not expanded due to the lack of key antioxidants like carotenoids or vitamin C.

Based on these studies, we do not think that the cutting of veggies will be considered an approach for increasing antioxidant health advantages.