Type of Cooking
How you prepare your foods will also impact their quality. Some vitamins, such as the B-complex vitamins and vitamin C, are water soluble, meaning they dissolve in water. If you cook these in water, you will, in effect, leach the nutrients from the food into the cooking water. The longer you cook them, the greater the nutrient loss will be. Unless you use the cooking water in your recipe, you are literally throwing nutrition down the drain. Microwaving foods minimizes nutritional loss, even with overcooking, simply because it is a quicker preparation method. For example, baking a whole acorn squash in the oven takes 45 minutes or more. In the microwave, it is cooked in only 7 to 10 minutes.