Welcome to Healthy Ish. Thanks for joining us on the daily podcast from body and Soul. I hope you are feeling healthy and also living the ish. I am your host of Felicity Harley. The cost of living is no doubt hurting most of us, especially as we hurtle towards Christmas and the festive season. It seems to cost a bit more to live. So one way we can save money is with frozen food. Oh well that's what the experts tell us, so is it actually healthy? I'm joined
today by nutrition and public health expert Louise Rubik. She is a Senior Learning Facilitator of Nutrition at Torrens University, Australia, and she shares her advice around using frozen food as a replacement for fresh food. Now make sure you're listening to our sister podcast, Extra Healthy Ish, where Louise gives a rundown of the essential vitamins every woman, no matter what life stage, needs to be eating. You can grab that episode wherever you get your podcasts. Louise, thanks for
joining us on healthy Is today. How are you healthish? I hope yes, indeed, Thanks Felicity really glad to be here with you. Now, this is an interesting topic because frozen food is it healthy? I mean, we've got the cost of living crisis. We all know that when we look at our bank accounts and our budgets and so much wisdoms out there encouraging us to buy and try frozen over fresh. So what are the benefits of eating frozen, Well, there's.
Lots of different benefits of frozen foods that people may not have considered aside from the cost. Obviously that's a really big challenge for people at the moment. But a lot of people don't think that frozen foods are necessarily.
As healthy as fresh.
We're always told to eat fresh foods where possible, but the nutritional value in frozen foods is still just as comparable as you would with fresh food, And particularly when you think about it, sometimes you've got great intentions of buying fresh food and might sit in the rotter as.
We might call it, in the bottom of the fridge.
And you'll actually lose a lot of nutrient values, particularly some of those water soluble vitamins like vitamin C, some of the big group vitamins.
They're lost within about twenty four hours.
Frozen foods can actually be picked and frozen at the site, so they kind of lock in the nutrients. It does matter, though, how you cook them. So if you then just throw your frozen food straight into a pot of boiling water, you're still likely to lose a lot of those water soluble nutrients and they'll just get thrown down the sea.
Interesting. That's actually a really important point because I'm sure people come home late throw the frozen vegetables straight in the pot of boiling water, and they think, oh, yeah, I'm just getting as much nutrients as I would be if I cut a carrot put it in.
That's right. So it is cost effective and it's convenient for the fact.
That it's also something that is already pre cut, which is really handy, and you know, obviously in smaller portions that might be really easy when you're cooking for a family or even if you want something smaller. So in that sense, it's also helping to reduce food waste as well, which is really important because a lot of people don't have the facilities to do composting or anything like that, and we're really trying to minimize how much fresh food waste goes into.
Our red bins.
But the availability is there and That's the other great thing about frozen foods is there can be available all year round, although we like to encourage people to eat seasonally, so you're still eating within the seasons and with whatever produce might be normally available for you throughout the spring
or throughout the summer, et cetera. We don't always have the availability or accessibility to go to, say up a great farmer's market, for instance, where you would be getting really nice, fresh, freshly picked, in seasoned vegetables.
So frozen gives you a really good opportunity to do that.
Are you talking specifically about veggies and fruits, What about other frozen foods like the fish and the things like that. What's your take on that.
So proteins can do freeze quite well, and again that would bring much more accessible nutrition if we're talking about fish, for instance, with all the lovely amiga threes that that contains, and the extra zinc and some of the b twelves
that you would get in those sorts of proteins. That also makes it really accessible for people to get frozen as opposed to fresh, where again that may not be as accessible and even the cost of buying fresh food or fresh fish and meat might also be quite challenging as well, and it means that you can portion it up a lot easier freeze it for another day. Fresh fish doesn't last very long. You will really have to cook it on the day that you buy it, or
at least within twenty four hours. So buying frozen is a really good, viable option, and it's quite safe in the freezer. The only issue is when it comes to preparing it and defrosting it. You have to be very very mindful to defrost in the fridge, preferably not on the kitchen bench, because the uneven defrosting of the food can actually harbor or promote an environment that might harbor bacteria.
You can really only cook food from a completely defrosted state so that it cooks really evenly and you lose any possibility of bacteria.
I think this is a great reminder that the freezer is there. It's there. Cook double the I mean, double the portion size, batch it off, freeze it. I mean, it's a great way to instead of I don't know. Sometimes in our household, leftovers get stuffed in the fridge and then four days later everyone's like, oh, when was this cooked? Can I eat this now, No I've frozen it.
No, yes, yeah, let it cool to an extent, but then freeze it as soon as practical. And if you can freeze fresh vegetables that you've brought home, you just need to put them in a single layer and then
freeze them. You can do the same with berries and things like that, but with leftovers with food, perfect to be able to freeze them up into smaller portions, because again we're saving food waste, and you're also making it really inconvenient for the week to des Grab a nice little portion of a meal out of the fridge and just make sure it's effectively defrosted and then heat it appropriately to make sure that it's safe to eat.
Any other tips or advice, I mean, we're going into Christmas, many of us looking at our budgets. You know, suddenly we spend more money around this time. Give us some tips on how we can save money on our weekly grocery bill, which we also spend more money on at Christmas, oh don't we.
And this is where planning ahead can be really important. So you could buy frozen vegetables in advance, or you could even spend some time leading up to Christmas with preparing fruits and vegetables, cutting them up, freezing them in that way, foods can also be partially cooked and then frozen too, and that also saves you a lot of time on Christmas Day or for those Christmas events when you you can then pull out sort of par cooked foods,
again making sure they're defrosted properly before they're cooked. But it's not a good idea to defrost foods and then refreeze them either, that's not advisable at all.
But of planning and saving time, that's where.
The freezer is a really very very helpful tool to have in the kitchen.
Great tips, Louise, Thanks for coming on Healthy Ishn't can I say Happy Christmas? I feel like we just talked about it. It's not that far away. Have a great Christmas period.
Thank you very much, Felicity.
Well, thank you listeners for tuning in to this episode with Louise and I hope it was a nice and sweet reminder to use your freezer to not only save money, but save you time and stress and encourage you to eat healthier anyway. Thanks for tuning in. Body and soul dot com that are us a place to go follow US on socials. You can DM me at Felicity Harley with any feedback. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy ish