Fresh vs Frozen... Where Are the Nutrients?
- Produce in 80% of markets are always picked weeks in advance and under-ripened. This is to avoid damage during processing and transportation of the produce.
- Under-ripened produce never reaches it's peak nutritional value and once a produce is picked, it's nutritional value deteriorates every day.
- From the time it takes produce to be picked, transported and displayed on the shelf, it can lose over 50% of it’s nutritional value.
- Produce is always frozen within a few days of peak ripeness. This is to ensure maximum flavor when produce is used.
- If produce is picked at peak ripeness and frozen immediately, it will have trapped the highest amount of nutrients that produce can contain.
- When produce is frozen fresh, all active enzymes and nutrients are trapped in place.
- Keeping produce frozen can retain their high nutritional value for many months and in some cases years.
Frozen produce has been proven to have the same, if not more nutritional value than your conventional super market produce. With that being said, frozen produce also has many X factors. Is the produce frozen immediately after being picked? What processing was needed before freezing? These factors can effect the nutritional value of the final product.
Conclusion
It comes down to you knowing where your fresh or frozen produce comes from. Produce from local farms or grown in your backyard will be high in nutrition. Produce frozen at peak ripeness with minimal processing will also be high in nutrition. It's about doing a little research and choosing which is best for you and your family.
Sometimes this information isn't easy to find. At Pitaya Plus, we're more than happy to share how we source our Pitaya. Our Pitaya / Dragon Fruit is organically grown and picked at peak ripeness for maximum nutritional value. We freeze our Pitaya in smoothie packs right after the pulp is extracted from the Pitaya shell. Our processing is so minimal and simple you can even grow your own Pitaya from our smoothie packs.
Eating healthy shouldn't be complicated and we hope this post helped. Please leave us a comment or let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading.
*Note: If you are ever curious on how to freeze a particular produce properly, please visit this site http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze.html
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