How to cook vegetables to make them sweeter

It's the craziest conundrum in the garden patch: Many of the healthiest vegetables taste unappetizingly bitter because of natural chemicals that give them their healing oomph. As a result, people frequently skip proven heart-protecting, cancer-defying foods like beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, eggplant, kale, and spinach — all of which earned high marks on official lists of high-antioxidant vegetables. Here are some easy ways to make those more bitter vegetables sweeter.

• Mix grated raw beets with lemon juice, golden raisins, and celery or roast with balsamic vinegar.
• In animal studies, the pigment responsible for the beet's purplish-red hue, called betacyanin, disarmed cancer-triggering toxins.
• The earthy taste of beets comes from geosmin, a type of chemical that also has cancer-fighting powers.

• Mash steamed florets with potatoes or shred peeled broccoli stems and sauté with garlic and a dash of olive oil.
• One antioxidant that makes broccoli bitter, called sulforaphane, whisks cancer-promoting substances out of the body.
• Another, dubbed indole-3-carbinol by scientists, discouraged tumour growth in lab studies and reversed suspicious precancerous changes inside cervical cells in women.

• Roast Brussels sprouts with onion chunks, then toss with rice vinegar.
• These broccoli cousins have plenty of bitter sulforaphane as well as compounds called isothiocyanates, which detoxify cancer-causing substances in the body before they can do their dirty work.
• In one Dutch study, guys who ate brussels sprouts daily for three weeks had 28 percent less genetic damage (gene damage is a root cause of cancer) than those who didn't eat sprouts.

• Cook red cabbage, chopped apples (leave the skin on for more antioxidant power!) and raisins in apple juice; season with ground cloves.
• Eating cabbage a few times a week can cut your risk of cancer of the breast, prostate, lungs, and colon.
• In one study of 300 Chinese women, those with the highest blood levels of cancer-fighting isothiocyanates (found in cabbage) had a 45 percent lower risk of breast cancer than those with the lowest levels.

• Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with oregano, and grill or broil.
• All types of eggplant are rich in bitter chlorogenic acid, which protects against the buildup of heart-threatening plaque in artery walls (and fights cancer, too!), say USDA scientists in Beltsville, Maryland.
• In lab studies, eggplant lowered cholesterol and helped artery walls relax, which can cut your risk of high blood pressure.

• Braise in cider to offset bitterness.
• Kale has compounds called glucosinolates that seem to fight cancer by activating liver enzymes that help disarm carcinogens.

• Eat it fresh and raw. Create a salad dressed with pureed raspberries (defrost frozen raspberries first), balsamic vinegar, and a dash of canola or olive oil.
• Possibly the healthiest veggie in the world — thanks to high levels of vitamins A, B6, C and K and riboflavin, plus generous amounts of manganese, folate, magnesium, iron and calcium — spinach also contains the antioxidant lutein, which protects the retinas in your eyes from damage or vision loss.