What effect does processing have on fruits and vegetables?

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Answer

Usually, very little. By processing, I'm assuming you mean doing something to the fruit or vegetable without adding anything extra. Freezing, canning, chopping, slicing, dicing, heating, boiling or what not really will not affect the nutrition value of fruits and vegetables.

However, sometimes extra junk gets added to fruits and vegetables during processing- such as sugary corn syrup or sugar or salt. Sometimes the vegetables get deep fried in greasy oil and so on- this is not good at all. Here, nutritional density of the food, that is, the amount of nutrients per calorie, is significantly reduced because you're eating all sorts of empty calories. If you ate a plain strawberry, you get a certain number of calories and a certain amount of nutrients. Now if you eat a processed strawberry that's been covered in sticky sugar syrup, you're consuming the same amount of nutrients as the plain one, but many, many more calories- ultimately a bad thing. Asparagus is a great vegetable, aspargaus deep-fried in lard is not.

The processing method does effect the nutritional value of any food. Boiling for instance can destroy all the nutritional value in food. It's why foods are fortified. Unfortunately, most of the synthetic vitamins that are added back in are not recognized by the body and are flushed out. Freezing is probably the best way to preserve the nutritional value of food.

Frozen and canned food can have as much as 30 to 50% of the potassium lost because the processors send the vegetables around the plant in hot water filled flumes (see http://charles_w.tripod.com/arthritis10.html ).

A common misconception is that the mineral content of dried fruit and vegetables are higher than in fresh. This is not true. The mineral content in a dried apricot is exactly the same as a fresh apricot, for instance. The effective vitamin content is much lower for vitamin B-1, because sulfur dioxide isn added, which degrades vitamin B-1 in the intestines.

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