The New Complete Book of Food
a process you can help along by dusting the squash with brown sugar. If you bake the
squash long enough, the moisture inside its cells will begin to evaporate and the squash
will shrink.
When you boil squash, its starch granules absorb water molecules that cling to the
amylose and amylopectin, molecules inside, making the starch granules (and the squash)
swell. If the granules absorb enough water they will rupture, releasing the moisture inside
and once again the squash will shrink.
Neither baking nor boiling reduces the amount of vitamin A in squash since the caro-
tenes that make squash yellow are impervious to the normal heat of cooking. Vitamin C, on
the other hand, is heat-sensitive. Cooked squash has less vitamin C than raw squash does.How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
Canning. According to the USDA, canned “pumpkin” may be a mixture of pumpkin and
other yellow-orange winter squash, all of which are similar in nutritional value.Medical Uses and/or Benefits
Lower risk of some birth defects. As many as two of every 1,000 babies born in the United
States each year may have cleft palate or a neural tube (spinal cord) defect due to their
mothers’ not having gotten adequate amounts of folate during pregnancy. The current
R DA for folate is 180 mcg for a woman and 200 mcg for a man, but the FDA now recom-
mends 400 mcg for a woman who is or may become pregnant. Taking folate supplements
before becoming pregnant and continuing through the first two months of pregnancy
reduces the risk of cleft palate; taking folate through the entire pregnancy reduces the risk
of neural tube defects.
Possible lower risk of heart attack. In the spring of 1998, an analysis of data from the
records for more than 80,000 women enrolled in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study
at Harvard School of Public Health/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, demon-
strated that a diet providing more than 400 mcg folate and 3 mg vitamin B 6 daily either
from food or supplements, might reduce a woman’s risk of heart attack by almost 50
percent. Although men were not included in the study, the results were assumed to apply
to them as well.
However, data from a meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medi-
cal Association in December 2006 called this theory into question. Researchers at Tulane
University examined the results of 12 controlled studies in which 16,958 patients with
preexisting cardiovascular disease were given either folic acid supplements or placebos
(“look-alike” pills with no folic acid) for at least six months. The scientists, who found no
reduction in the risk of further heart disease or overall death rates among those taking folic
acid, concluded that further studies will be required to ascertain whether taking folic acid
supplements reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.