Where to find out about nutrient loss during freezing, canning, boiling, etc.?

[AlexR]

I've often wondered how many nutriments are lost during processing and cooking...

Ideally we'd all eat raw feeds and be healthy, long-lived, ecological, etc.
Of course, this is not for most people...

However, it would help to know if buying fresh rather than canned or frozen, for instance, is really THAT much better.
Presumably, there has been a great deal of research on the subject, but none of it seems to have found its way into the mainstream media (because of lobbies?).

Let's take green beans.
Let's take frozen, canned, and fresh.
What is the relative nutritional value of each?

How much goodness is robbed of food we buy in the supermarket?

And, to make my question even more complicated, what difference is there between the green beans picked this morning and ones picked two weeks ago and stored in the fridge?

Of course, I realize that apples can be stored for months and that other produce can only last a couple of days, so the answer to such questions is "it varies".
Fair enough. But where can you find out just how much it varies from item to item?

Best regards,
Alex R.

 

[Andy M.]

The USDA has a database of food nutrients information that lets you compare foods in different forms. Here is a link to their site. You can use it online or download it to your computer (PCs only) and use it anytime. http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search.

 

[dcSaute]

Alex -

it's a wonderful thought - the question / problem is _vast_ - and pretty much all the "studies" are slanted toward the pocketbook that paid for the "research"

even the FDA / USDA is held as "handmaiden" to big business - probably can't find any two groups, much less extremist groups, to agree on any of it.

and that is totally discounting the TV "talking heads" that take a study of an Andean spotted red striped yellow bean - which grows no where in the world but on one half square yard at 25,000 feet elevation, and extrapolates the results tabloid style to "All red beans are xxx"

fresh is best. is raw better? perhaps - of course, raw lima beans contain minor toxins.... there's a number of raw things the late night TV guys can scare the living daylights out of you with - excepting of course their magic machine/book/diet/fairy dust/cleanser takes care of all that.....

if you've ever had beef from today's slaughter, you'll appreciate the theory of wet/dry aged beef.

add to that the enriched / fortified / "stuff" added for canned/frozen/processed foods - now there's a mess.

stuff degrades with time - in or out of the refrigerator. three day old snap beans - might as well stitch the ends together and sell them as hula-hoops to the Keebler elves.

the vitamin and "(insert big long name here) acids with lots of dashes" valuables are likely first to go - some of those are more perishable than others.

some of those are partially/completely destroyed by heat - as in cook fresh or cook-in-the-can.