Packed with power

Simple tweaks that can supercharge nutrients in regular food — and lead to big savings on those fancy supermarket buys
A little kitchen science could dramatically boost the nutrition in the everyday ingredients you love. And all you have to do is know the tricks to get the most out of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that have beneficial effects on our health when we eat them.

Here’s how to make almost any food a superfood:

1 ‘Wound’ the salad
There’s one simple thing you can do to your salad when storing that sends its antioxidant levels soaring — wound it. To non-geeks, this is also known as slicing or tearing, just as you would do when normally preparing a salad, and has the effect of causing the leaves to produce more protective antioxidant compounds. Place cut salad leaves in a sealed container in the fridge overnight to give these chemical reactions time to happen and their polyphenol levels can jump up to 50 per cent, according to one Italian study.

2 Cook the spinach
Take a crisp, leafy spinach salad and whack it in a hot pan for a few minutes and its Vitamin A levels will triple. And because spinach wilts down so much on cooking, a typical serving of cooked greens can contain up to five typical servings of raw leaves.

3 Keep tomatoes out of the fridge
Not only does storing tomatoes in the fridge cause them to lose their flavour, it can also reduce the amount of lycopene — a phytonutrient with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties — they contain. Instead, store them at room temperature as once detached from the plant, tomato fruit will continue to ripen, becoming sweeter, redder and, as a consequence, much higher in lycopene.

4 Choose small potatoes
Up to 50 per cent of healthy polyphenols in potatoes come from their fibre-rich skin. The smaller the spud, the more skin they have relative to volume, which means that simply by picking new potatoes over giant types, you will consume more phytonutrients in a standard serving.

5 Buy smaller berries
Following the same relative size rule, choose smaller blueberries. The larger relative surface area of skin means they’re richer in the anthocyanin purple pigments that are found almost exclusively in the skin and are linked to fighting disease.

6 Brew your tea with boiling water
Tea snobs will tell you it should never be made with water over 80°C. But according to University of Leeds research, boiling-hot water is significantly more effective at drawing out the healthboosting catechins from the tea leaves than water that’s been left to cool a bit. Leaving a tea-bag in the water for 10 minutes (five minutes longer than average) will further boost this effect.

7 Dark lager is better than light
Like wine, the unique blend of phytonutrients in beer is believed to give it health benefits. More precisely, these phytonutrients come from the mixture of darkcoloured compounds found in the outer layers of malted barley grains. Picking a dark malt beer can deliver nearly twice the phytonutrients of paler lagers and as much as three times that of non-alcoholic lagers.

8 Use old garlic
Old garlic bulbs, especially those that have started to sprout, have been shown to manufacture far more sulphur-based chemicals, sending their antioxidant content soaring — a phenomenon that is almost certainly due to the bulbs’ attempts to defend themselves against stress. If fresh garlic is superhealthy, that old garlic you have knocking about at the back of your cupboard is likely to be even better and with a much stronger flavour to boot.

9 Reheat your pasta

Pasta has often been vilified as a sort of diabetic rocket fuel guaranteed to send blood sugar levels soaring out of control. As always, however, the science tells a rather different story and reveals pasta has a unique structure that ensures the carbs it contains are steadily released into the bloodstream. Plus, by chilling and then reheating cooked pasta, you can further reduce any rise in blood sugar by 50 per cent, according to a small trial by the University of Surrey.

10 Microwave your spuds

There have been loads of studies over the years investigating the effect of different cooking methods. But microwaving whole potatoes in their skin consistently proves the best at retaining pretty much every nutrient, closely followed by boiling them whole in their skins. Steaming and baking were roughly on a par, but a definite step down. Worst of all, unsurprisingly, was frying.

11 Don’t peel carrots
According to the Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment, the polyphenols in carrots are not distributed evenly throughout the veg, but concentrated in their outer layers, particularly in the skin. So the act of peeling carrots could more than halve polyphenol levels. In fact, because younger carrots are thinner and therefore contain proportionately far more skin, baby carrots, which are usually served unpeeled, may be the very best option.

12 Place mushrooms on the windowsill
We’re all short of Vitamin D. However, doing one simple thing to your fresh mushrooms can transform them from containing virtually zero Vitamin D to being one of nature’s richest food sources. Popped on a sunny windowsill, the mushrooms — which commercially are grown in near darkness — will react to the UV light, churning out loads more Vitamin D to defend themselves from Sun damage.