Greetings,

Does anyone happen to know how much enzyme activity there is in frozen raw fruits? Is alot lost due to the freezing?

I love berries, but no organic variety is available to me in the winter.

I welcome any input.

Thanks

Hello,rawpower!

As far as I know, if they aren't blanched first and are Individually Quick Frozen, fruits are supposed to be in a state of nutritional "suspended animation," so to speak. The trouble is knowing whether they've been blanched. Anything with a soft peel, like stone fruits(peaches, necaterines, plums) that is missing its peel in frozen form has probably been blanched. Most berries are OK. I have not yet discovered a means to find out for sure about tropical fruits(mangos, papayas), so I gamble: if it tastes fresh, I assume it's still raw and viable. But I do tend to to buy strictly raw fruits in season.

Tamukha,

Thanks so much for the info; much appreciated.

I agree that in season raw fruits are the best. The frozen berries make up a very small part of my fruit intake.

Depends on the enzyme. Some of the ones that work on fats are extremely resistant to breakdown at low temperatures and require high pressure processing and blanching as well to be "killed."

Enzyme damage is just protein damage, which in itself doesn't mean much--your body can do perfectly well with isolated amino acids rather than intact proteins.

What's more significant is vitamin and phytochemical damage. And yes, there is some of that, but again not as much as with cooking.

Thanks, Arugula.

You really know your stuff.

I look forward to your replys to my future posts.

Thanks so much!

Hi rawpower4me

You might find this article I wrote on freezing of interest.

[debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com]

You can look at the nutrients in frozen fruit v unfrozen fruit online, now this would not be all-encompassing and include enzyme activity but you can compare them and you can see how the nutrients are damaged. The vitamin C goes from 9% to 3% some of the other nutrients loose just a percent when they are frozen, others loose a lot.

Frozen Blueberries
[www.newcaloriecounter.com]

Un-frozen Bluberries
[www.newcaloriecounter.com]

The one thing that this doesn't measure, is what the same blueberries would have nutritionally if they were raw or frozen. I.e. we don't know if the frozen bluberries were blueberries that were picked at the end of the season, got enough water or other nutrients, came from the same field or were somehow already lower in nutrients before they were frozen than the fresh berries that were tested.

A true test of nutrient loss would be to pick all of the bluberries off of one bush, then test some of the fresh berries and freeze the rest, and then test the frozen blueberries. That would eliminate all of the other variables and the only variable left would be the freezing process.