Vitamin C

:This article is about the nutrient.

Food preparation

It is important to choose a suitable method of food preparation that conserves vitamin c content. When cooking vegetables, one should seek to minimize temperature and duration of cooking and not discard water used in preparation. e.g. by steam cooking or by making soup.

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Recent observations suggest that the impact of temperature and cooking on vitamin C may have been overestimated:

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• Since it is water soluble, vitamin C will strongly leach into the cooking water while cooking most vegetables — but this doesn't necessarily mean the vitamin is destroyed — it's still there, but it's in the cooking water. (This may also suggest how the apparent misconception about the extent to which boiling temperatures destroy vitamin C might have been the result of flawed research: If the vitamin C content of vegetables (and not of the water) was measured subsequent to cooking them, then that content would have been much lower, though the vitamin has not actually been destroyed.)
• Not only the temperature, but also the exposure time is significant. Contrary to what was previously and is still commonly assumed, it can take much longer than two or three minutes to destroy vitamin C at boiling point.

It also appears that cooking doesn't necessarily leach vitamin C in all vegetables at the same rate; it has been suggested that the vitamin is not destroyed when boiling broccoli.1, this may however just be a result of vitamin C leaching into the cooking water at a slower rate from this vegetable.

Related Topics:
Broccoli - 1

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Copper pots will destroy the vitamin.

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Vitamin C enriched teas and infusions have increasingly appeared on supermarket shelves. Such products would be nonsense if boiling temperatures did indeed destroy vitamin C at the rate it had previously been suggested. It should be noted however that as of 2004 most academics not directly involved in vitamin C research still teach that boiling temperatures will destroy vitamin C very rapidly.

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