Adding more vegetables to your diet is a great way to to get more vitamins and antioxidants. However, if you're not careful, the manner in which you prepare them may rob them of many of their nutrients. This is why it is important to consider cooking method when putting together a nutritious dish.

When a vegetable is boiled, many of the nutrients it contains naturally leach out into the water in which it is being cooked. Furthermore, long periods of exposure to heat can cause some nutrients to break down. This is particularly the case with vitamin C.

The Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide recommends cooking vegetables in the microwave as one potential solution to the problem. This method quickly heats up vegetables, limiting their exposure to heat. Furthermore, it's possible to steam the food rather than boiling it, which eliminates the risk of losing nutrients into the cooking water.

For people who have made the decision to eat healthy, there may be nothing worse than learning that their cooking method is destroying the nutritional value of their food. Knowing how to cook vegetables is an important part of preserving their vitamins and antioxidants.