Friday Favorites: Are Pre-Cut Vegetables Just as Healthy?
Endotoxins can build up on pre-chopped vegetables and undermine some of their benefits.
Here are those old videos I mentioned: The Exogenous Endotoxin Theory ( ) and Dead Meat Bacteria Endotoxemia ( ).
For some other practical veggie vids check out Best Way to Cook Vegetables ( ) and How to Cook Greens ( ).
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I love this channel!
Have there been any studies on chopped frozen vegetables?
@Western Gardenia thanks. This helps. 😊
It’s far cheaper (as well as healthier) to cut & chop your own + it lasts longer as the rest isn’t chopped up + less waste + more health gains to your body (compared to shop pre chopped). Lots of pluses… 👍
and there are plenty of gadgets to help if you have conditions that make regular chopping difficult….love my Veggie Bullet!
Significantly cheaper, its almost comical how much theyre charging.
I didn’t know how dangerous cooked poop was… until now.
😀
Good to know this. Thanks. Here in India pre chopped not much of a trend still it’s good to know this. I always chop myself, never use pre-chopped.
I usually buy whole vegetables in good quantities and chop myself, mix and keep freezed (to be steamed) or fridged (to be eaten raw) in portions of 3 to 4 servings.
Do you blanch them before freezing ?
I hear and understand. I’m still going to buy prechopped cabbage, and I’m still going to make my breakfast salad before bed (which almost always is low fat and sos free). But, I will memorize this detail in case I ever need some extra anti-inflammatory boost. Life is a balance of limited resources. But, I love learning about all the research, so I can make informed decisions (good or bad). Thanks Dr. Greger and team!
If using pre-cut veggies leads to eating more vegetables than it is certainly worth the extra cost.
Interesting. I chop a lot of veg to keep in the fridge for quick meals and snacking.
Here’s something interesting to add. What it means I’ll leave to all of you. I have two pigmy goats and they love vegetables, even freshly cut; but if I give them frozen precut veggies (takes a few minutes to thaw outside, btw) they not only ignore them like they’re poop, they give me the stink eye like I played a bad joke on them. Subtle humor aside, they will NOT touch the purchased frozen precut veggies, whereas, they will devour fresh uncut veggies (like kids given free rein in a candy store), even if they were *refrigerated first. Go figure.
*Note: I refrigerateed them for only one day to serve them the treat on Thanksgiving.
Dunno if the reasons are applicable to this video, but I will say I always assumed that wherever these precut veggies were sourced, that wherever they were sourced failed to list some chemical spread over said veggies. In fact, it’s because of this is why I now only eat fresh veggies and not the frozen (more convenient) veggies sold in stores. Thoughts? Please share. Thx.
Frozen broccoli tastes awful to me so clearly freezing some veggies affects them. I’ve used frozen riced cauliflower and it seems fine though it tends to get mixed in with spices and such better so maybe the bad flavors are more hidden.
We didn’t buy/use many froz. veg except hard to find items like organic corn. Riced cauliflower because it was cheap and convenient. We’ll be freezing our own fresh cut from now on when we are not able to eat fresh.
Good stuff doc. My donations are well spent on your information
I always have felt that pre-chopped is not as fresh and tasty as fresh chopped fruits and veggies. Lately I chop up onion and keep that in the refrigerator for a few days for my dinner salad, but it looks like I am better off chopping a little onion just before I make the dinner salad.
but still I think I would need to cut a little bit of a fresh onion every day- maybe we need tiny low-cost onions for this because in theory just cutting another layer from an already cut into onion sitting in the fridge would have been compromised by entotoxins- but maybe the toxins do not reach deep past the cut surface.
although looking at the graph- refrigerated onion seems to be very low in terms of endotoxin infiltration
Very interesting topic. Thank you for covering it. 🌻
Dr. Greger’s next webinar, How Not to Age, is coming up on October 6. For more information and to register, go to: https://nutritionfacts.org/webinar/how-not-to-age-webinar/
awesome dr 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Makes me wonder about spices. We mostly use whole and grind them fresh for better flavor, but the same issues probably apply to preground. Hopefully at a lower level because spices are higher antibiotic than veg.
I wonder what the study would find with frozen chopped vegetables vs if we bought whole vegetables, chopped and froze them for meal prep ourselves? We’ve always been taught that the store bought frozen were “just as healthy or better than fresh” because they are flash frozen. Side note: My horse will not eat baby carrots but loves big whole carrots broken into smaller pieces. I always thought that it was because of the bleach wash process that they go through. I stopped buying the baby carrots because of this.
What about cooked and refrigerated leftovers? Does this only apply to raw vegetables?
Does that count for frozen veggies too? Like broccoli, peppers etc.?😢🌱 It’s so easy, cheap and always accessible 🙇🏼♀️
thank for enlightening us what about prepared meals or microwavable ready meals ?
I wonder what this would mean for meal prepping too? It’d be nice if there was a paper showing the change in inflammatory status over time. Like how soon after freshly chopping should you consume the foods?