Continuing the on-going battle of the bulge I was reading a diet book and came across this sentence:
Are they suggesting that 1 cup of raw carrots loses 50% of it’s mass (but retains nutrients) when cooked or are they suggesting that cooking carrots somehow causes nutrients to materialise that weren’t previously there?
I believe that they are saying the cooked carrots have the nutrition (and most likely the same mass) of uncooked carrots, but they take up 50% of the *volume *of the uncooked ones (as measured with a dry measure).
When eating carrots raw, they are generally unpeeled. And many vegetables have much of the nutrients in or just below the peel, so that might enter into it.
But in general, most of what you read in diet books is either untrue or a half-truth.
Cooked carrots 1 oz: 10 Calories; 95% of RDA Vit. A; 3% RDA fiber, 5% of Vit. K.
Raw carrots, 1 oz: 10 Calories; 77% RDA of Vitamin A; 3% RDA fiber; 3% Vitamin K.
Maybe both some sugar and water goes out, such that the there are fewer calories in less volume, but the vitamins remain?
I was always taught to peel root vegetable, especially if you don’t cook them. The logic is that you wouldn’t eat any other food that had been covered in dirt.
You mean like potatoes? Because just washing them would never work!
I suspect the thing with carrots is that the fibrous mass breaks down under cooking and so is more compactable. I can’t see what it has to do with dieting, frankly, unless they were saying that the raw carrots would make you feel more full.
Roddy
Actually they are trying to convince you to eat cooked carrots instead of raw, Roddy. The theory being that they make you feel less bloated or ‘bunged up’, a lot of the book talks about improving digestive transit as a means of weight loss.
As t-bonham@scc.net points out diet books are not the most reliable source of facts and this book is no different but that one sentence struck me as being a bit odd.
Whilst the theory behind why the diet works is shaky at best it does work (according to independent study) and I suppose it is the results that are important more than why the results occur in the first place.
I am unaware of people who eat raw potato skins. If we’re going to eat raw potatoes, we peel them. While we rinse the skins, I’ve never heard of actually washing them. I know we call it washing when we rinse them, but would you consider your hands clean if you just ran water over them?
There’s a reason I reported it the way I did, as something I was always taught rather than a raw fact. I don’t know if our idea of dirty actually correlates with increased sickness/infection potential. But, considering the 5 second rule, since when has that stopped social customs?
Finally, your answer to the OP was the one I had originally planned to add to my previous post, but I couldn’t figure out how to word it. Nutrient density is a big thing in dieting–you want foods that make you feel fuller faster. There is a theory that the dopamine response observed in overeaters is activated by feeling full, and thus feeling full with less food can still get you your “fix.”
Cooking carrots breaks down the fiber and makes them easier to digest. Many foods like carrots and tomatoes offer more of certain nutrients when cooked.
PBS expert DR. Covert Bailey and radio doc Dean Edell have said carrots are one of the most difficult vegetables to digest, not that they are not great for you.
Read the book called “Catching Fire” by Richard Wrangham (I discovered that there are no fewer than four books by that name when I googled the title to find the author). The main point of this book is that we get much more nutrition out of cooked foods than raw. In particular, we get relatively little from raw carrots unless we chew them endlessly. And, although he doesn’t mention it specifically, I have read elsewhere that we get almost none from raw potatoes.
As far as I know, few classes of “non-fiction” books are less trustworthy as a group than diet books and I would never assume that anything they said was true. In particular, there can be a huge difference between the calories as measured in a bomb calorimeter and what the body actually extracts.
Just as a case in point. I once read that there was an enormous growth in the number of urban starlings when horses were the main mode of transit and the numbers crashed when horse-drawn vehicles started being replaced by cars and trucks. The reason was that the birds were feasting on the undigested oats in the horseshit. And horses are herbivores, which humans are not.
Support for the claim that more is absorbable from cooked carrots.
Yeah, baby food is best yet.
There have always been the pro-wash versus anti-wash veggie arguments.
The pro-wash is it removes pesticides and dirt and other such impurities that hurt you
The anti-wash is that it removes things like some of the vitamins and minerals.
In the West lack of vitamins is not an issue. Unless your a baby and poor or elderly and poor, or have a specific disease, a vitamin deficiency is not going to happen.
Dense foods like mayonaise take up much less room than bulky foods. So whether you eat bulk or not depends on your diet plan.
On the potato skins and eating raw bit: When I lived in Southern Idaho, my buddies and I would often drive by the 'tater fields during a harvest. You could always get a worker to toss you a few fresh-from-ground 'taters, or more with some bargaining. It was not uncommon for us to take one and wash/scrub it off in the irrigation canal (diverted Snake River basically) and ‘sterilize’ with whatever alcohom we had (beer, booze, ya know?!), or take a lot to eat on our sturgeon-fishing trips. Not a one of us would worry about the skin; preference was for it to be on as it gave it a MUCH better crunch 
If there was a bad/spoiled spot, easy enough to carve it out if needed. The soil they grew in was pretty sandy and clean enough (imho) to be scrubbed off the spud with sufficient friction. It was not common for the soil to not come off really easily. Other locales could differ, sure (!). I just wanted to say that sometimes, that skin is good. (ymmv, to each their own, and all that, of course). I still walk by my wife when she’s peeling potatos for dinner and grab/eat some of the skins, after rubbing them ‘clean’, too. Tastes better, to me, than after boiling 'em in oil.
I hear that research shows that many more people in the West who think they are, are malnourished, because they eat junk food, and thus don’t get enough vitamins (though enough calories). This appears to be true esp. for the poorer, less-educated population, both because they don’t know enough about vitamins etc. to notice the lack of in their diet (thinking that one leaf of salad on their hamburger counts as “salad”), and because they lack the opportunity/ money to buy fresh veggies, store and prepare them.
Many people in the middle class also live a stressful life with not enough fresh veggies (because in a rush, they eat prepared food), but they can afford at least vitamin supplements - though these often come with their own problems.
I don’t eat raw potatoe skins, but I like oven potatoes (or even better, fire potatoes): you take a veggie brush and brush the potatos thoroughly under water, then cut them into thick slices and put on a baking tray, into the oven for 20 min. You can add salt and caraway or similar.
Or, if it’s harvesting season and you get young, small potatoes (spring potatoes mmmm), you scrub them with the brush, steam them with the skin on, and then quickly swill through a bit of butter. Serve, eat with the skin and a dab of butter. Mmm.
It depends on how the potatoe was grown. If unfertilised human or bovine shit was sprayed over the fields - which is often done in conventional agrar business to get rid of the shit from mass animal production - you can catch infections. Conventional production also has a risk of pesticides, which are not good. Washing even with hot water doesn’t remove them all, so the recommendation would be to peel. Plus, conventional food that has been bred to huge volume only, and pushed with artifical nitrate, has very little vitamins left, anyway.
On the other hand, if you buy organic potatoes, there will only be fertilised shit, so no risk of infection, and only the normal air/water residue of pesticides. Plus, you probably get a specialised breed that might be higher in secondary beneficals. So washing would be better than peeling, since the vitamins etc. are right under the skin in potatoes, the rest is starch.
You always need to cut out the green spots, of course.
But this varies from veggie to veggie, and fruit to fruit - some have thin skins, some thick, some vitamins throughout, some only under the skin.
I read the OP as saying that cooking releases some of the water in the carrots, thus cooked carrots are sort of like concentrated carrots. I think it would depend on the type of cooking done to the carrots, but my experience with steaming carrots is that they do not seem to shrink as much as most vegetables do.