If you want to get the best out of your carrots, what you should actually be doing is cooking them and then chopping them up, according to The Daily Mail. Leaving the vegetable whole prevents important nutrients from being easily washed away into the water, claim scientists.
Because of this they also taste better, they say.
Carrots contain a large amount of carotenoids, which your body converts into vitamin A. Dr Kirsten Brandt, in previous research, found rats fed on a diet containing carrots or isolated falcarinol were a third less likely to develop full-scale tumours than those which were not.
The team also performed a taste test on almost 100 participants comparing carrots boiled before being cut with those that were chopped beforehand. More than 80% said that carrots cooked whole tasted far better.
Dr Carrie Ruxton, an independent nutritionist states: “This is good news as boiling them whole appears to help them keep more of the nutrients. This could apply to other vegetables, such as parsnips which are from the same family and have a roughly similar size and texture.”
So, it does not just apply to your favourite orange vegetable.
Whether or not you want to peel the vegetables is largely a matter of personal taste, she then says – “It's a good idea to scrub potatoes rather than peel them because all the vitamin C is under the skin, but with vegetables that contain more uniformly distributed nutrients it shouldn't be that important.”
Despite this, she still stands by eating them raw for all of the goodness from the vegetable.
