Raw or cooked? - updates - Brief Article

Better Nutrition, Nov, 2002

If you want the greatest nutritional value from your corn, how should you eat it: raw, quickly steamed or thoroughly cooked? In fact, the answer might surprise you.

In truth, cooking corn for a long time at a high temperature actually boosts the vegetable's antioxidant benefits--and the longer you cook it, the better. So concludes a study appearing in the August 14, 2002 issue of the California-based Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

The study's lead author, Rui Hai Liu, PhD, of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his team cooked sweet corn in batches at 239F for 10, 25 and 50 minutes. Cooking increased the antioxidants present in com by 22, 44 and 53 percent, respectively.

The study also determined that cooked corn contains ferulic acid, a substance thought to have anti-cancer properties--and that its presence, too, increased with cooking. "We found that ferulic acid was substantially increased after we cooked the sweet corn at high temperatures and after we cooked it at the same temperature over a longer time," Liu says.

"There is a notion that processed fruits and vegetables have a lower nutritional value than fresh produce," says Liu. "Those original notions seem to be false because cooked sweet corn retains its antioxidant activity, despite its loss of vitamin C."

Antioxidants neutralize free radicals, which are believed to cause cellular damage that can lead to cancer, heart disease and other ailments.

While it's not clear if all cooked vegetables have a higher nutritional content, similar studies on tomatoes show that people tend to absorb the cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene more quickly from cooked tomatoes than they do from uncooked ones.