A variation on a theme we have already blogged about but one that is worth repeating. When eating foods rich in carotenes, for instance a salad containing tomato, carrot and peppers, add some fat to get the most out of it.
In this publication the authors are talking about eggs. Researchers recruited 16 healthy male volunteers for the experiment and gave them salad with 75g or 150g of scrambled egg added or salad with no egg as a control. Total blood carotenes were measured hourly for 10 hours.
They found that those consuming the higher amount of egg (actually 3 whole eggs) had significantly more carotenes in their blood, after accounting for the carotenes that came from the eggs.
It is a shame they used scrambled eggs for the test, for one thing, I would think a boiled egg that was chopped up would just fit better to a salad but also a recent publication found that the carotenes from the eggs were more readily absorbed when the egg was not scrambled.
For those that didn’t see the previous blog about carotenes and fat, the other researchers used lipid rich avocado to help increase the amount of beta carotene the subjects’ bodies could absorb from their food.