Food For Thought: Easy Meals That Are Fresh, Not Frozen

What if we could stay healthy without sacrificing half of our days to cooking?

Life is busy, and we need easy meals to make it all work. We tend to live by those words as if the clock has the final say on our lifestyle, and, frankly, we all deserve a nice lasagna at the end of the day anyway.

I know we all cut a few corners to make things easier on ourselves, like freezing ingredients for making meals later—but there is a hidden price to that lifestyle:

  • Frozen food lose vitamins during the freezing process.
  • Frozen foods lose even more nutrients in the cooking process.
  • Boiling veggies strips them of nutrients more than anything.
  • It still takes 20-30 minutes to heat frozen food anyway.

 

At the end of the day, we sacrifice health for convenience, thinking it's a necessary evil for a hectic schedule.

But it doesn't have to be that way. 

 

Easy Meals Don’t Have to Come at a Cost

Ironically, while frozen foods seem to save us time, they actually lack the nutrients to fuel our busy days.

These easy meals often lose some of their nutrients during the freezing process, particularly Vitamins C and B. 

easy meals - fresh not frozen

Recent research has found that frozen vegetables lose nutrients not only while they remain frozen, but also when we thaw them out after months in the freezer. 

 

From Fresh, to Frozen, to Thawed - What's the Difference?

Frozen foods lose their vitamins and taste when we unfreeze them.

Specifically, they tend to lose nutrients like Vitamin B while microwaved or boiled. We do get the convenience of easy meals when we unfreeze them, but it pretty much defeats the purpose of eating in the first place!

Another issue with relying on frozen foods for convenience is that it's a slippery slope.

We all know that a quick fix is just that - but by establishing a simple food prep routine and managing your fresh grocery list with some new strategies, you can correct the problem at the core. 

 

Make the Switch Tonight

Here at Meal in Jar, we knosome dishes simply don’t work with raw ingredients… but many do! And that vision has grown on the Waterloo Region.



Locally sourced ingredients ensure that we’re putting high-quality food into our bodies. We stopped sacrificing nutrition for convenience, and we’ve never looked back!


Healthy food doesn’t need to eat into our free time, either—here’s why.


It’s possible to make easy meals with plenty of protein and fewer calories. Every Meal in a Jar contains:


5 grams of protein
2 servings of vegetables
500 calories or fewer (sometimes just 230!)
homemade taste

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