Frozen?! you say. Isn’t that unhealthy? I want to highlight that frozen is sometimes better than fresh. I know this sounds like health-food blasphemy, but it’s true.

The reason is in the ripening process. Frozen items are often picked later in the season, as these are the fruits and vegetables that are too ripe to make it half way around the world into your local supermarket. Timing is everything, and many of the “fresh” items in the aisle were carefully timed to ripen – on their own – in the shipping container on their way to your destination, not on the tree or in the ground.

In simplest words, less time to ripen in the dirt usually means less nutrition in the product, as that is where the nutrients come from: they are leached from the dirt around it and passed to the plant product.

Of course, all this is trumped if you’re buying from your local market. So start there. But, if you’re eating something that isn’t at your local market and it will be easily prepared (as in the case of a morning smoothie) with its frozen form, go with the frozen form. You may save time, money, and reap more nutrition with the frozen counterpart.