Abstract
Minced diets can be prepared in two different way using 11 kinds of vegetables, that is, in one way the vegetables are minced to a smaller size beforehand and then boiled. In another way, the vegetables are out into the regular size, boiled and then minced to a smaller size. We determined and compared the lose of 7 major types of minerals in these 2 types of minced vegetables. Furthermore, we examined the influence of the mineral content in the water used for boiling on the prepared minced vegetables. The obtained results were as follows.
(1) The vegetables that were minced to a small size and then boiled had a greater mineral content loss, but with a few exceptions, than those obtained by cutting into a regular size, boiled then minced.
(2) The mineral content in the vegetables that increased along with the increased water hardness was only the Mg, which was high from the beginning, when the change in 5 kinds of minerals including Na, K, Ca, Mg, and Fe were examined by boiling the 5 kinds of vegetables in water of different hardness, i.e., 100, 500, 1000, and 1500, prepared from deionized water and commercially available bottled deep-sea drinking water with a hardness of 1500.
(3) When tap water was used as the water for boiling, it appeared that the mineral in the tap water hardly affected the mineral loss in the minced vegetables.
(4) When the vegetables obtained by draining after boiling with the water of hardness 1500 prepared from the bottled deep-sea drinking water and MgCl2 and those obtained by draining after boiling and rinsing with the deionized water were exmined. The Mg content in the latter was lower than in the former, but higher than that in the control even after rinsing with water. Taking into account these findings, there in the possibility that the increase in the Mg content might have been partly due to the absorption of Mg into the vegetable tissue as well as adhesion.
