If you listen to the health bloggers, mom bloggers, fitness bloggers, the ubiquitous Gwyneth Paltrow-wannabe bloggers, you'd think the only way to get healthy is to 1) shop exclusively at Whole Foods, 2) only buy organic produce, and 3) buy only fresh fruits and vegetables, never frozen or (gasp!) canned.
But, that's silly. First, shop where it make sense for your budget. For me, that's a combination of my local chain grocery store, the Asian market for hard-to-find produce, and occasionally a high-end grocery store for certain items I can't live without.
Each week, frozen foods make it into my cart. I can’t live without frozen peas, cauliflower (frozen cauliflower makes the best mash), beans, spinach and chopped broccoli (great as a filler in soups). Frozen food is cheap and easy to store and convenient as I can take from the bag what I need and return the contents to the freezer for later use.
And now, there's more evidence that frozen food is actually better than fresh food (although, both remember that both fresh and frozen are great so don’t worry if you’re eating fresh over frozen, but if you're lookign to save money, you dont' have to feel guilty). According to this article on Foxnews.com, frozen is actually slightly higher in nutrients.
A team of scientists from the University of Georgia compared fresh with frozen, as well as a third category dubbed "fresh-stored." This mimicked the typical length of time people tend to store fresh produce after buying it and was found to be around five days.
The researchers focused on these family favorites:
broccoli
cauliflower
corn
green beans
green peas
spinach
blueberries
strawberries
To judge how fresh each product was, the scientists measured levels of key nutrients, including vitamin C, vitamin A and folate. In many cases, there was little difference between the fresh, fresh-stored and frozen varieties. But, where the researchers noted vast differences, they found the frozen produce outshone the fresh counterparts. They said: “The findings of this study do not support the common belief that fresh food has significantly greater nutritional value than its frozen counterpart.
Read more here.