By Ellen Ecker Ogden

Most of our modern plants are bred to appease our palates, keeping the sweet or mild and overlooking the healthy benefits of bitter and strong tasting. Tracing plants back to their heirloom ancestors reveals that vegetables have changed dramatically over thousands of years, which is why we are not always getting maximum benefit from the food we eat.

Whether you are growing or buying vegetables, here are the top ten vegetables to select for optimally healthy eating.

Top 10 Vegetables for Healthy Eating

1. Garlic. Choose the deep red–skinned varieties over all-white cloves and follow the ten-minute rule: smash the garlic and let it sit 10 minutes before you add it to a sauté pan. Sitting causes the key ingredient, allicin, to activate. Otherwise, the heat of cooking kills the allicin, and your garlic is merely a flavoring.
2. Onions. Choose red or yellow onions with pungent flavors that bring tears to your eyes. Onions that contain more sulfur are stronger in flavor than the sweeter types such as Vidalia or Walla Walla. In a 2004 study, extracts of strong onions destroyed 95 percent of human cancer cells in the liver and colon, while those of sweet onions killed only 10 percent.
3. Beets. Heirloom Chioggia (candy-striped), golden, or white beets are beautiful to grow, sweeter in flavor, and contain qualities such as not “bleeding” in a salad. Yet a classic deep red beet that has been grown for centuries contains far more iron and betalains, plus has remarkable storage qualities for winter reserves.
4. Carrots. It’s a bit of a mystery how orange carrots captured the market, when purple carrots offer forty times more vitamin E than any other color. Purple carrots most closely resemble their wild ancestors, with red carrots coming in second place.
5. Crucifers. Broccoli, cabbage, and kale are the most nutritious crops of all and are an excellent source of sulforaphenes, an anticancer compound. Most are slightly bitter, so wait until the temperatures drop below freezing for these veggies to turn flavorful.
6. Lettuce. When choosing to grow lettuce, opt for red, reddish brown, purple, or dark green. Take it a step further to look for loose-leaf varieties and open butterheads over tight crisp head or iceberg lettuces.
7. Peas. Eat the whole pod with snap or snow peas over traditional shelling peas if you seek maximum nutrients and fiber. Better yet, grow a range of different types of peas, one of the harbingers of spring and fall gardens.
8. Potatoes. Found in the Andes, the Peruvian purple potato was said to be the first, and over the centuries has been bred to be bigger, disease resistant, and eventually all white. Go back to the original for more flavor and more nutrients.
9. Salad Greens. Arugula, radicchio, endive, and spinach grow year-round and are ready for the salad bowl only a few weeks after the seeds are sown. Choose from the many varieties; all are easy to grow and offer trace nutrients that no scientist has bothered to measure, but you know they taste better than store-bought.
10. Tomatoes. Small is beautiful when it comes to healthy tomatoes, especially the tiny purple tomatoes that were found high in the Andes. Eventually bred to be larger and sweeter, the original tomato is somewhat sour but has four hundred times more lycopene than the average garden variety.

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Ellen Ecker Ogden is a Vermont writer and the author of The Complete Kitchen Garden and other books on food and gardens. She graduated with a degree in fine arts, and attended cooking school with Marcella Hazan in Venice, Italy, and at the Ballymaloe School in Shanagarry, Ireland. Her articles and kitchen garden designs have appeared in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Garden Design, Eating Well, Better Homes and Gardens, and Country Gardens.

Well Being Journal adapted this excerpt from The New Heirloom Garden copyright © 2021 by Ellen Ecker Ogden. Used by permission of Rodale Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.