Many women are unable to stand when somebody starts teaching them to cook. However, sometimes it DOES make sense! There are secret cooking tricks making dishes more salubrious and sometimes even tastier.

Boil Before Cut

Here is the last discovery in the field of cooking science. How do you usually cook a carrot? Most probably you cut it into pieces and then add it to the soup or some other dish. It appears that it's wrong. Dr. Kirsten Brandt, ‘a professor of sauerkraut soup' from the University of Newcastle advises to boil a carrot as a whole first and to cut it afterwards. He conducted a serious study using the most precision chemical analyzers and found out that chopped up carrots contain 25% less of the anticancer substance called falcarinol than in wholly boiled vegetable. Moreover, the professor proved with the help of 100 tasters that ‘boiled before chop' carrots are more delicious.

Many housewives know that potatoes cooked in their jackets are more wholesome as skin reduces the loss of potassium in boiling water.

Cut Before Eat

However, integrity principle is not universal as many anticancer vegetables need to be cut, the finer the better. For example, garlic. If there is garlic in your dish, begin to cook with it. Finely chop or squeeze cloves of garlic and forget about them for 10-20 minutes while preparing other ingredients. Meanwhile, oxygen and ferment came out from damaged cells do their work. They synthesize allicin, a strong anticancer agent.

So, add enriched garlic to salads and other dishes in the end. Do the same with onion. Remember, more pungent onion contains much more anticancer agents that make you cry while chopping an onion up.

Cabbage also contains half-finished product but not a cure itself. It can be activated by ferments. The principle is the same as garlic cooking method. Cabbage provides with isothiocyanates that are strong agents protecting women from breast cancer. By the way, sauerkraut is very salubrious for women. Boiled cabbage (for example, in stuffed cabbage rolls and cabbage soup) is less healthy. The best way to cook cabbage is to steam. It refers to all varieties of cabbage such as cauliflower, broccoli, etc. But it would be better not to cook cabbage at all. Finely cut cabbage leaves, crumple a bit till giving juice and leave for 15-20 minutes. Then make a salad. Anyway, even if you heat such prepared cabbage, it will be healthier.

Fresh tomatoes will be more useful if you cut them and fry a little or make a tomato purée or paste. A red carotenoid pigment presented in tomatoes and called lycopene is better to digest this way. It's one more anticancer agent but also good for vessels and heart.

"You are what you eat", says the ancient Indian science of life. So all we need to be healthy is near at hand. Hope you will add these cooking tricks to your armory!