Your Food is Always Changing: TeakOrigin @ Home

It’s been eight weeks since we started Teak@Home and our team has come up with some fascinating, and scientifically verified, results about the state of produce in our homes.

We at TeakOrigin are on a mission to measure the most important elements of our food: nutrients, and that hasn’t stopped since we’ve been home. Quarantine has allowed us to focus our mission where many of us interact with food the most, our kitchens. We’ve been able to verify that food is incredibly dynamic, not just across different examples of produce, but even individual pieces of produce. Produce undergoes a lot of change as it sits in your fridge or on your counter. Here are some of our most fascinating results.

1. Nutrients disappear over time

We know that nutrients degrade during transportation and if they are cut or damaged but we learned that many nutrients degrade as your produce sits safe and whole on the shelf. One of the best examples is the tomato. We analyzed a set of the exact same tomatoes over the span of 5–10 days to see how they changed individually.

If you want to maximize the number of nutrients you get from your tomatoes, eat them quickly after you get them home. We found a 20% decrease in vitamin C after just four days. Vitamin C is notorious in the scientific literature for degradation, but our degradation happened in whole, uncut, undamaged tomatoes. But if Vitamin C isn’t your biggest concern, then you don’t need to worry. Over that same period of time, neither sugar nor moisture decreased. So though they lack Vitamin C, they’ll still have the same taste and texture.

2. Some nutrients evolve over time into new nutrients — and new flavors

In different produce though, time, and change, isn’t always bad. We know from a lifetime of experience that over time bananas turn brown and taste sweeter, but we wanted to know what was really happening. We tested a set of bananas over 5 days and found that taste change came from nutrient change. The sweeter taste came as sucrose in bananas broke down into glucose and fructose, both of which taste sweeter than sucrose. In fact, 50% of the sucrose broke down after 5 days. But don’t worry, if you’re eating bananas for their potassium, we found that minerals tend to be stable. No matter the age or ripeness, a banana will have just about the same level of potassium as the day you bought it.

Food is Dynamic

Food is dynamic, and not all food is created equally, even if retailers and food labels tell us it is. Even the highest quality food changes over time. So, what can you do? Based on what we are seeing, if you are eating produce for vitamins, try to eat fresh food as early as you can. And to give yourself the best odds, visit TeakOriginGuide.com to learn which grocers are providing the most nutrient-packed foods and which foods are doing best this month.

Now’s the time for the entire food industry to value food based on the things we want and need, like nutrient density, and not on things we don’t need, how the food looks on the outside.