nutrient quality of frozen veggies

Hey there!

First of all, I love Thrive so far and my body already feels better than it did before. To be honest, I had very few vegetables in my diet up to now and Thrive makes me change a lot of things, which is definitely a positive thing;)

When it comes to the dinner veggies, I mainly went with frozen vegetables the last days, as I wanted to make it rather easy and convenient in order to make it a consistent habit. Therefore my big question is: Are frozen vegetables okay? Is their nutrient quality much worse compared to freshly cooked vegetables? I guess it's not that easy to trivialize, so what should I be looking out for when shopping for frozen veggies?

Thanks for any feedback;)

I think Jeff mentioned, that frozen veggies are completely acceptable and as far from I've read their vitamin content is very close to fresh veggies as long they stay frozen the entire time. There are even cases where frozen or canned veggies are superior to fresh, for example when they have to be transported very long.

Regarding the quality I think it "depens", you will notice that for example "bofrost" here in Germany has really good quality though its not ecological. Bedsides that you could go after the "clean 15" list from EWG? Problem with the quality of frozen stuff is that can't have a look inside the bag, so I guess the only way is to test for yourself.

Good question and Adrian does a good job answering. 

Just to echo and expand; most times veggies are cut then frozen right away. Yielding a pretty fresh product. All things being equal they are pretty close. But in the winter time when the veggie of your choice is only grown on the other side of the hemisphere and you are comparing that with frozen = in my opinion for the value I like frozen

Thanks to both of you!

I'm a little unsure about mixed packages, when there already is some sort of seasoning included. Right now I'm just trying to be careful reading the ingredient lists, avoiding flavor enhancers and stuff like that. Are there other red flags we should look out for when shopping those?

Reading the ingredient list is about all you can do. Once you cook and eat them you will know, just keep buying the same brands after that. 

On 4/6/2017 at 11:10 AM, Jeff Serven said:

Good question and Adrian does a good job answering. 

Just to echo and expand; most times veggies are cut then frozen right away. Yielding a pretty fresh product. All things being equal they are pretty close. But in the winter time when the veggie of your choice is only grown on the other side of the hemisphere and you are comparing that with frozen = in my opinion for the value I like frozen

+1 to Jeff's response.

To the best of my knowledge most frozen vegetables are flash frozen (at very low temperatures) very soon after harvest. Vegetables, generally speaking begin to lose nutrient density very quickly after harvest so the flash freezing process is beneficial in the preservation of nutrients in the product. My advice when using frozen is to be cautious in the preparation as it can be easy with certain vegetables to produce soggy end product due to the frozen water molecules in the frozen veggies cooks differently than fresh