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Consume Frozen Venison Quickly

Venison is considered a delicacy by many and is usually prepared and served on special occasions. Because of its low-fat content and its high protein content, the meat of venison, deer, and the like is also preferred by figure-conscious gourmets. You shouldn’t wait too long to enjoy it, because deep-frozen game meat should be used up quickly.

Prepare venison as soon as possible

If game meat is stored in the freezer, it should not be too long before it is eaten. The consumer information service aid advises processing deep-frozen game meat quickly. The best before date should be taken into account.

If the recommended storage time is exceeded, the fat in venison begins to taste rancid. If deer, stag, and co. are killed during the mating season, the meat may taste slightly like urine. In order to be able to enjoy the full taste, it helps to freeze the venison for several months.

That’s why venison is healthy!

Especially in the winter months, dishes with, for example, roe deer, partridge, fallow deer, wild boar, and rabbit are on the menu. All these game species have this very special taste that characterizes the meat. It is also high in protein and low in cholesterol and fat. Venison contains even less fat than lean pork or beef – the only exception being wild boar, which is relatively fatty.

The meat of wild animals mainly contains B vitamins as well as iron, selenium, and zinc. Before consumption, game meat should always be thoroughly roasted at a core temperature of 70 °C, otherwise, there is a risk of infection with animal disease. In addition, the heavy metal pollution and pesticide residues in game meat could sometimes be higher than in slaughtered animals.

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Food

Smoothies: Do Not Use Fruit Stones or Frozen Fruits

Health-conscious people don’t leave the house in the morning without their smoothie. When preparing the vitamin drink, however, there are a few things to consider so that the positive health effect does not turn negative. For example, frozen fruits and fruit stones are taboo for smoothies.

No fruit pits for smoothies

Not all ingredients for fruity smoothies are healthy – the right choice makes the difference! For example, no fruit cores such as those from apples, cherries, or plums should be put into the blender, as the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer advice center is now warning.

During the digestion process, the nuclei form hydrocyanic acid. This in turn can lead to poisoning, shortness of breath, vomiting, or cramps in large quantities. The fruit stones should therefore be carefully removed before adding them to the smoothie mixer.

No frozen fruit for smoothies

Frozen fruits like strawberries, raspberries or blueberries are popular ingredients for smoothies. After all, the goods are fresh from the field, where they are shock-frozen directly. On the one hand, this means that a lot of vitamins and minerals remain, but on the other hand, the burden of pathogenic noroviruses can also be high.

The virus can be killed with heat. For this, it is necessary that the frozen fruits are not used directly from the freezer or thawed, but are heated to at least 90 degrees before consumption. If possible, smoothie lovers should use fresh, seasonal fruit from the region and only occasionally switch to frozen goods.

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Food

Frozen Pizza, Nutella and Co.: Many Sweets and Ready Meals Are Really That Harmful

Researchers have found that palm oil promotes the spread of cancer cells. Although the substance is so dangerous, it is found in many foods.

A new study shows how dangerous many foods and other everyday products are. Because palm oil is found in many foods, such as pizza, chocolate spread or baby food. But also in shower gel, hand cream and detergent. According to a new study, the palmitic acid contained in palm oil can promote the spread of metastases – and thus the spread of cancer.

Palm oil in food: Palmitic acid can alter cancer cells

Researchers at the “Institute for Research in Biomedicine” (IRB) in Barcelona have proven that palmitic acid, which is mainly found in palm oil, changes cancer cells. The food industry often uses palm oil as a cheap fat in many finished products. Because: Palm oil tastes similar to butter and gives food a spreadable, creamy consistency. Palm oil is often added to many finished products, sweets and baby food. In the cosmetics industry, surfactants and emulsifiers are made from palm oil components.

But palm oil is not exactly one of the highest quality vegetable fats. It’s fairly high in unhealthy saturated fat and low in healthy unsaturated fat. Furthermore, palm oil has long been suspected of being involved in the development of diseases.
The IRB study now shows how palmitic acid promotes the spread of metastases.

Why does palm fat promote the spread of cancer?

The researchers at the IRB were able to find out in mouse models how palmitic acid from palm fat causes cancer by altering its genome. This increases the likelihood that tumors will spread. Metastasis, or the spread of cancer, remains the leading cause of death in cancer patients. The vast majority of these people can now be treated but not cured.

“There is something very special about palmitic acid that makes it an extremely powerful promoter of metastasis,” IRB director Salvador Aznar-Benitah told the Guardian newspaper. The study, conducted on mice, found that palmitic acid promotes long-term metastasis in oral and skin cancer.

The study noted that there is no evidence to date that all dietary fatty acids can promote cancer metastasis. Other fatty acids such as oleic and linoleic acid, so-called omega-6 and omega-9 fats found in foods like olive oil and flaxseed, did not show this effect. More specifically: None of the other fatty acids tested generally increased the risk of developing cancer. With palmitine, however, this is different.

Breakthrough in cancer research?

In order to spread, cancer cells need certain nutrients. The researchers at the “Institute for Research in Biomedicine” are certain that cancer cells are primarily dependent on fatty acids. In the experiment with the mice, it became clear that oral and skin cancer spread more quickly when the animals were given palmitic acid. Palmitic acid appears to regenerate cancer cells, causing metastases to form.

According to Dr. Helen Rippon, executive director of Worldwide Cancer Research, “a major breakthrough in our understanding of the link between diet and cancer and, perhaps more importantly, how we can use this knowledge to develop new cures for cancer.”

This knowledge could now also help to improve cancer treatments in the future. Because metastases are responsible for about 90 percent of all deaths in cancer patients. As the authors of the study noted, if we now learned more about which foods or components of products promote the spread of cancer, we could possibly reduce the number of cancer deaths in the future

Can’t you just replace palm oil?

Palm oil has long been criticized and raises the suspicion that it promotes the development of diabetes, vascular diseases and cancer. This is due to the high proportion of saturated fatty acids and industrial processing, which can produce carcinogenic substances. If palm oil is heated too much, fatty acid esters are formed, which the “Federal Institute for Risk Assessment” (BfR) has already classified as carcinogenic.

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Food

Frozen Pizza: Is it Also Available in Sustainable and Climate-Neutral?

Pizza always works. Many of us love to eat them – albeit with a guilty conscience. Because frozen pizza doesn’t have a good reputation: it’s unhealthy, the ingredients are anything but regional, and frozen pizza is also supposedly bad for the climate. We looked into the question of whether there are “better” pizzas.

Frozen pizzas are all the rage. Every  eats an average of 13 frozen pizzas a year, and the trend is rising. The favorite variety: salami.

Nevertheless, more and more people are asking themselves when buying pizza: Is ready-made pizza from the freezer okay at all? The suspicion: it has a lot of calories, a bad environmental balance, ingredients that have been widely traveled. We investigated whether frozen pizza really is as bad as it’s made out to be.

Is there a “better pizza” at all?

Our research shows: the range in the freezers of supermarkets and discounters is large, but anyone looking for sustainable frozen pizzas beyond the salami and margarita mainstream has a hard time. Nevertheless: There is now a small and fine selection of organic pizzas, vegan frozen pizzas and even climate-neutral pizzas.

How unhealthy is pizza really?

Whether organic or climate-neutral – pizza is not really healthy, at least not in the frozen version. Due to the mostly white flour, it contains a lot of carbohydrates, but hardly any fiber and few vital substances.

Conventional pizza contains many additives

The list of ingredients for 0815 frozen pizzas contains additives such as antioxidants, stabilizers, acidifiers, emulsifiers and other processed ingredients such as extracts, modified starch or up to six different types of sugar, criticizes the consumer advice center.

Each pizza contains up to 14 grams of sugar. Healthy is different.

Pizza = calorie bomb

Pizzas from the freezer are real calorie bombs – a pizza often contains more than 800 calories. Since people tend to eat up what’s on the plate, moderation is difficult here. If you want to take care of your health and figure, it is better to only eat half or two-thirds of the pizza and save the rest for the next day or two. Families can easily share pizzas and save calories.

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Cooking Tips

Grind Frozen Coffee Beans

Frozen foods can be found in almost every household. But what about coffee here? Does it stay durable and fresh longer?

Coffee from the freezer – What should be paid to? And what are the advantages and disadvantages?

If you want to grind frozen beans, you should definitely consider a few steps. Coffee beans quickly lose their aroma and thus the taste that we love. From shopping, freezing to thawing and grinding, the coffee bean needs special treatment.

Freezing is a popular way to be able to store food for longer and to protect them from external influences. But what about coffee here? If you want to grind frozen beans, you should definitely consider a few steps. Coffee beans quickly lose their aroma and thus the taste that we love. From shopping, freezing to thawing and grinding, the coffee bean needs special treatment.

The coffee is one of the most drunk drinks in the world. With the diverse selection of flavors these days, much of the fresh coffee at home often ends up at home. But where with excess coffee that cannot be used up quickly?

With every day that the coffee is stored longer, it loses valuable flavors.

Here the freezer can remedy the situation and the beans can also protect the beans in the long term. A simple embedding and later defrost, as is common with most foods, should be avoided. In the following we give you precise instructions to be able to grind frozen beans.

Coffee beans from the freezer compartment

Coffee should generally be used within a week. So hardly any flavors are lost and you can look forward to a constant pleasure. If you want to keep your beans longer, you can sometimes freeze them.

Appropriate freezer bags are suitable for freezing. It is the most ideal if you use several small bags so that you can later remove the beans in portions. After you have filled them up with the coffee beans, you should pack them airtight and, if possible, vacuumed. If you do not have your own vacuum device, you can also try to close the bags to a small air hole and then suck out as much air as possible with your mouth. This prevents the flavors contained in the beans. The minus degrees now ensure that almost no work processes can take place. The beans are protected from air, water, and outer influences.

The next step is to thaw. In contrast to other foods, the beans should not be thawed in the sun or in the air. This creates a condensation effect that allows the flavors inside the beans to escape. You can easily avoid this process by having the beans thawed in the closed freezer bag. This means that the protective cover is not removed and there is no condensation. You can also process the frozen beans directly into powder. You can find out the pros and cons of one of the next sections.

When freezing coffee beans, it depends on safe and airtight and vacuumed packaging. The subsequent reconstruction finally decides on the preservation of the flavors. External influences such as heat or moisture should also be avoided here!

Aroma parts of the frozen bean

Grinding a frozen coffee bean is now even the rule in some households. All around, the frozen condition ensures all kinds of advantages that are not available in classic storage. However, this storage only pays itself when buying a large amount. After all, the coffee still tastes best from the shop. The frozen variant is always worthwhile for people who have found a good espresso on a trip and take a larger portion with them or store many different types at once.

If you also want to try to grind frozen beans, you are guided by our helpful tips. If you stick to our guide while freezing and thawing, you can look forward to a usual delicious coffee taste. So it pays to buy a little more coffee and save yourself a walk or two to the roastery or in the supermarket.

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Food

Frozen Versus Canned Food: Which Is Better?

Seasonal fruit and vegetables are healthy and also environmentally friendly. But what about frozen food and tin cans? Which preservation method is the gentlest for vitamins and minerals – and therefore the healthiest? Which method is the most environmentally friendly?

Healthy Eating: Frozen or Canned?

Freshly harvested fruit and vegetables contain a particularly large number of important nutrients. However, vitamins – such as vitamin C – are very sensitive to light, heat and oxygen. For this reason, fruit and vegetables should not be transported over long distances and should be eaten as fresh as possible. But what happens to the nutrients when they are preserved by freezing or in the can?

When processed into frozen food, fresh fruit and vegetables are frozen just a few hours after harvesting. This has clear advantages: The levels of minerals and vitamins are still very high and remain largely intact even when temperatures are consistently below zero.

A study by the University of Hamburg shows that the vitamin C content of raw peas was already significantly reduced after seven days of storage at room temperature, while the content hardly changed after two years of deep-freeze storage at -25 degrees (study pdf).

Another plus point: Frozen fruit and vegetables do not contain any preservatives. Frozen food – at least if it is not frozen ready meals – does well from a health point of view, but what about canned foods?

Compared to fresh or frozen products, jarred or canned fruit and vegetables have a lower nutrient content: they are heat sterilized to kill microorganisms and inactivate enzymes.

This preserves the product, but important nutrients such as heat-sensitive vitamins suffer. In addition, mixtures of water, sugar, acids, herbs and sometimes additives are usually added.

Another aspect that does not speak in favor of the can from a health point of view: Tin cans are usually made of tinplate or aluminum, both metals are stable and protect the food from gases, light and odors.

The inner surface is sealed with plastic so that no metals are released from the can and transferred to the food. However, this plastic coating often contains the harmful bisphenol A (BPA): it is suspected of acting like a hormone in the body.

Frozen or Canned: Which is Better for the Environment?

For a long time, frozen food was notorious for being particularly harmful to the environment: the complex production and energy-intensive storage in the freezer at home cannot be environmentally friendly at all. However, a study by the Freiburg Oko-Institut (pdf) shows that this is not necessarily true.

The Freiburg scientists examined various product groups: rolls, chicken fricassee, peas, pizza and potato pancakes. For all products, the greenhouse gas emissions of the compared variants were relatively close to each other.

The example of the peas shows that the different variants are relatively close together. Canned peas have the best climate balance, while frozen peas are in the middle. However, the results depend heavily on the boundary conditions, for example the storage time in the freezer has a major impact on the overall result.

All in all, our behavior influences the carbon footprint of the peas by around 38 percent: a lot can be achieved through the preparation, storage in the household, washing dishes, the trip to the shop and the choice and setting of the refrigerator.

In the life cycle assessment of chicken fricassee, the frozen product performs better than the unchilled or self-prepared product, which is also due to the industrial preparation in large quantities. But here, too, the values are close together.

The illustration shows that it is not the consumer who has the greatest influence on the result, but the way in which the raw materials are provided. In the case of vegetables, this means cultivation and, in the case of meat, livestock farming. With chicken fricassee, keeping the chickens accounts for around 42 percent of the raw material supply. It is therefore decisive for the ecological balance whether the products are of animal origin and whether the product is composed of many different ingredients.

Our actions have a big impact

The general conclusion of the Freiburg study is: frozen products are no more harmful to the climate than canned products; the recipe and consumer behavior are decisive. The higher the proportion of meat and milk, the greater the “fixed cost share” of the climate impact.

Another study shows how big the impact of our behavior on the carbon footprint of food is:
If a consumer decides in favor of the climate for 1 kg of fresh instead of deep-frozen goods, he saves a smaller amount of greenhouse gas emissions than is caused by a 2 km long car journey.

In other words, driving to the grocery store is “worse” than buying frozen instead of fresh vegetables. In any case, it is worth questioning your own actions. You can make a big difference with these eight tips:

Ditch the car and ride your bike – or, if necessary, use public transport – to go shopping.
Plan your purchases so you avoid food waste and long storage times for frozen products.
Place frozen products last on the belt and get them into your freezer as quickly as possible.
Check: how energy efficient is your freezer?
Only open your refrigerator briefly and let freshly cooked food cool down before freezing.
Follow the preparation instructions on the packaging.
Fresh seasonal products from the region are the best choice.
The less meat and animal products you eat, the better for the environment.

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