Do you also have such a fixation? When buying vegetables, you always insist on choosing the fresh ones that have just been picked. The hard "frozen goods" in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator are mostly used just to fill up the quantity?

You might even have heard such a statement: "Frozen fruits and vegetables have lost all their nutrients long ago. Eating them is not as good as chewing plastic." But do you know? This notion might really need to "calm down" a bit.

The word "fresh" sounds really appealing, as if a tomato, as soon as it is picked and sliced, automatically brings vitamin C into your body. But the truth is often much more complicated than we imagine.

Do frozen fruits and vegetables have any nutrients? Are they the "backup" or "substitute" in the world of nutrition? Today, let's peel back this question layer by layer, just like peeling an onion. What you think is new might actually have been "old" long ago.

The baskets of fresh-looking green vegetables at the morning market, as they travel from the farm to your hands, have to go through what? From picking, transportation, wholesale, shelving, to you carrying them home and putting them in the kitchen. Sometimes it takes three or five days. Even though the leaves still look tough, the water and vitamins have already sneaked away secretly.

According to research conducted by the Institute of Agricultural Product Processing of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, if spinach is left at room temperature for 3 days, more than 50% of its vitamin C content will be lost. This is not an exaggeration by me; it's a matter of real nutritional loss. And what about frozen fruits and vegetables? They are often sent to processing plants within a few hours of being harvested and undergo "rapid freezing and preservation" treatment. This process is called "rapid freezing" technology, which can quickly lower the temperature of fruits and vegetables to below -18℃, thereby maximizing the retention of their nutritional activity.

The "rapid freezing" technology of frozen fruits and vegetables is somewhat like a time capsule.

You can imagine frozen fruits and vegetables as children placed in a "time machine". Although they are not the hot and current versions, the nutrients at the moment they were rapidly frozen were almost completely preserved. According to the analysis in the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine, the antioxidant content in frozen peas and frozen blueberries is even slightly higher than that of fresh similar products that have been refrigerated for a few days.