Tuesday 4 March 2008

Buckets of zinc

In my ongoing analysis of foods (by 120 cals worth, i.e. one tenth of my daily intake) my search has been to find good sources of those vitamins and minerals in which I can end up deficient if I take my eye off the ball. One of those is zinc. Now I know all about oysters. A few oysters contain enough zinc to make a bucket, the only problem being I find them repellent. I might experiment with a few canned ones, but I don’t want to get my nutrition from something I dislike if there are yummy alternatives. So far my results on zinc are as follows – and the figures I give here are the percentages of my RDA of zinc as provided by 120 calories worth of a food. So 10% plus is good and I rate 20% plus as very good.

Courgettes (zucchini) 59, asparagus 41, mushrooms 35, spinach 35, low fat feta cheese, 26, Chinese leaves, 22, mung bean sprouts 21, cucumber 20. (Fat free mozzarella is 29 but I can’t get it in the UK) Now I probably wouldn’t be able to eat 120 calories worth of cucumber (mind you, I ate 113 calories worth of cabbage today, and jolly nice it was, too) – these figures are a measure of how hard the food is working for me. Broccoli, lettuce, pumpkin, skim milk, cauliflower, chicken, Brussels sprouts, tofu, low fat mozzarella are all in the range 15-18, and in the 10-14 range we have oats, tomatoes, chickpeas, kale, quinoa, sunflower seeds, celery, red and green peppers, aubergines (eggplant), sardines in tomato sauce, tuna and cabbage. All these foods also supply good to excellent values of other essentials. I’m sure there are others I may have missed but this is a good start, and the best thing is, these are all foods I like a lot!

6 comments:

Gypsy Girl said...

All the food you mention on your list sound yummy to me. I agree about the oyster.YUCK
Thanks for helping me out with the CRON-o-meter question about recipes. I am now finding it very helpful and trying to use the CRON-o-meter daily to track my calories.

Sara said...

That would be about 300g of courgettes? Sliced, grilled, with lemon juice and black pepper? No problem for me to eat that much! :-) As usual, thanks for this! Ditto on the oysters - although the idea of being able to share something so low cal and nutritious with P while he believes it to be decadent is an appealing one!

Sara said...

Ah, you said cucumber not courgette - ignore me, it's very early in the morning... :-)

Julia said...

Linda,

about the cucumber, I usually leave them with a bit of salt for 5 minutes and they lose a lot of water. 300 grams of cucumber becomes 100 grams, much easier to eat and tastier ;-)

Linda said...

Courgettes are one of my favourite veg. I love the way they retain some bite even after slow cooking. The other day I cut them in batons, and stewed them gently in tomato juice with onions garlic and herbs. I will try the cucumber idea - I assume that if you rinse them really well it will leave no noticeable residue of salt.

HkGrace said...

I love these lists of nutrient-dense foods. Even though I already know most of it, it's refreshing to hear it again and to bring foods to the front of my mind. Keep them coming!