Is it healthy for pregnant women to bring food to work?
Experts say that in order to ensure nutrition during pregnancy, some expectant mothers will cook a nutritious dinner at night and take it to the company for microwave heating the next day. So, is it more nutritious and scientific for pregnant women to bring meals at noon?
Experts remind: In fact, overnight meals are not necessarily safe and healthy, and sometimes heating with meals is not necessarily hygienic.
Many people think that the food cooked at home is far more hygienic and nutritious than the lunch outside. It is true that the dishes cooked at home are indeed more reassuring and taste better for you. But overnight leftovers are not as healthy as expected. For example, the nitrite content of overnight vegetables will increase with the increase of storage time, especially green leafy vegetables. Moreover, the nutrients of repeatedly heated meals will be reduced, such as vitamin C, which is far less than that of freshly cooked meals. Expectant mothers can't get as much nutrition as they think.
Besides nitrite, overnight meals can cause other problems. For example, although most packed lunch boxes are put in the refrigerator, the temperature will still rise on the way to work. Especially in the warm and hot season, pathogenic bacteria will multiply in large numbers, such as Escherichia coli and Salmonella. It is easy to cause gastrointestinal diseases in pregnant women. Studies have shown that meals left for several hours will breed a lot of bacteria.
Experts remind:
It is not advisable to bring fish and seafood with you for lunch, because fish and seafood are prone to produce protein degradation products overnight, which is harmful to your health.
It is even more inappropriate to bring your own lunch with green leafy vegetables. Green leafy vegetables contain different amounts of nitrate. If heated or stored in the microwave oven for too long, vegetables will turn yellow and taste bad, and nitrate will be reduced to toxic nitrite by bacteria, which will cause cancer.
Rice is the best staple food, and steamed bread, pies and other staple foods should not be brought into the box lunch. From the point of view of microwave heating, the heated rice can basically keep its original state, but steamed bread and pie are easy to dry and are not suitable for microwave heating.
Compared with green vegetables, eggplant vegetables are not easy to deteriorate, and it is not easy to change the color and fragrance of dishes after microwave heating.
It should be reminded that the vegetables to be brought should be fried until six or seven minutes are cooked, so as to prevent further damage to their nutrients when microwave heating. Classic dishes such as scrambled eggs with tomatoes and roasted eggplant are more suitable for "bringing rice". Besides, you can eat protein, which can relieve fatigue. Meat and bean products are the best choices for lunch.
Improper use of lunch boxes is also not conducive to the health of pregnant women.
As we discussed before, the materials of some lunch boxes are not as safe as we thought, especially plastic lunch boxes. Because of insufficient materials, repeated high-temperature heating will release substances harmful to the human body, threatening the health of expectant mothers and fetuses. For details, please refer to the article "Pregnant women should carefully choose plastic lunch boxes for hot meals".
Of course, if you really can't guarantee the hygiene and health of your lunch at work, bringing a meal is also a relatively safe choice. It is best to choose some fruits and vegetables that can keep fresh, and pay attention to nutritional collocation.