Avoid These Canned Vegetables That Chefs Steer Clear Of

From childhood, one dietary fact is impressed above all others: five servings of fruit and vegetables are key to a healthy lifestyle. While produce alone can’t give us enough of the nutrients required for a balanced diet – like calcium, fiber, and protein, to name a few — it plays an undeniable role in keeping our bodies in tip-top condition. Making our fruit and veggie consumption easier is the fact that we can now purchase it in so many ways. Grocery stores are packed with fresh, frozen, and canned produce, with the latter in particular going a long way in helping us sneak extra veggies into our meals.

But not all canned veggies are built equal. We’re firm believers in anything that makes cooking, especially healthy cooking, cheaper, faster, and more convenient. Even so, we couldn’t help but wonder if we were blindly stumbling into making meals that were less tasty or less nutritionally dense by strictly relying on the canned variety of vegetables. To find out, we spoke to experts who immerse themselves in the veggie-verse daily. These are the canned vegetables you may want to avoid, according to chef Supreme Dow, founder of The Harvest Academy; Clare Wilson, the vice president of culinary R&D at Jason’s Deli; and chef Brooke Williamson, who published the cookbook “Sun-Kissed Cooking: Vegetables Front and Center” in 2024.

Tinned tomatoes are one of the most convenient canned goods on the market, useful for everything from pasta sauces to shakshuka. However, not everyone is sold on the idea of using canned tomatoes, with Chef Supreme Dow counting them as one of the canned veggies he tends to avoid. He explains that they’re one of the veggies that “usually contain high salt levels and added sugars and lose their nutritional value throughout the canning process,” which means you’re not reaping their full benefits when cooking.

The reality is that, yes, while canned tomatoes are delicious, the reason they taste so good is that the producer has often tossed a bunch of extra salt in the mix to make them that way. That’s the case for a lot of canned goods, vegetable or not, with salt acting as a preservative that helps foods stay edible for longer. If you aren’t willing to give up your tinned tomatoes habit, there is one easy fix. Next time you’re perusing the cans aisle, look for tomato varieties labeled as “low salt” or “low sodium.”

Peas are one of those veggies that are endlessly easier to handle when they come in a can. They’re also a good source of protein and dietary fiber, which plays an important role in minimizing your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even some kinds of cancer. While there’s no pressing need for you to ditch canned peas for good (and we definitely won’t be renouncing them for good), there are some perks worth considering for their fresh counterpart.

As explained by Chef Brooke Williamson, there’s a common downside to opting for green vegetables like peas in their canned form. “Anything with chlorophyll will lose any ounce of freshness or nutrition, and really the vibrancy you’re looking for when cooking with vegetables is lost when it’s canned,” she says. While she acknowledges canned vegetables “can be an acceptable substitution,” she prefers to use frozen veggies in a pinch.

Chlorophyll isn’t the only factor that makes frozen peas the superior choice. According to Livestrong, frozen peas contain twice as much vitamin C, nearly twice the amount of folate, almost thrice the vitamin A, and nearly four times the beta carotene. The only area where canned peas reigned supreme was vitamin K content.

Packed with vitamin K, vitamin A, and dietary fiber, there are plenty of reasons why you should incorporate asparagus into your diet (including the relatively unfounded legend that it can help ease your hangover). Fresh asparagus, however, can be pricey, which is a natural consequence of production declining in recent years. That makes frozen or canned obvious alternatives for those needing an asparagus fix.

While canned asparagus is better than no asparagus, the former does have its downsides. As highlighted by Chef Brooke Williamson, all green veggies — asparagus included — lose some of their vivid, chlorophyll-powered hues when canned. As it’s typically pre-cooked, canned asparagus also tends to be much more mushy than fresh asparagus (and let’s be real, “mushy” isn’t a word anybody wants to use when describing their veggies). It’s also often considerably higher in sodium, which can be somewhat improved if you go through the extra step of rinsing your canned asparagus before cooking or eating.

Sodium is once again the biggest reason why you may want to skip canned green beans. If you, like us, have ever found yourself wondering why they taste so different fresh from the can versus from the fresh produce aisle of the supermarket, that’s because they’re usually drenched in a salty, flavor-enhancing liquid. A half cup may contain as much as 380 milligrams of sodium, which is just over 16% of the daily recommended sodium limit set by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Yikes.

Aside from their sheer saltiness, canned green beans also have slightly less nutritional value. According to Prevention, canned green beans typically contain less protein, magnesium, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, and iron than fresh. These differences are by no means drastic enough to discount canned green beans from a balanced meal, but they’re still worth considering if you’re keen to optimize a dish’s health factor.

There’s a lengthy list of health benefits to spinach, including improved eye health, better heart health, and reduced oxidative stress. Popeye was eating this stuff for a reason. However, if you base your veggie choices on a cartoon character’s secret weapon, you may want to gloss over the part where he consumes his spinach straight from a can. While it may be considerably cheaper, has a far longer shelf life, and is still healthy, it does bear a few flaws.

For one thing, canned spinach contains significantly more sodium. As it’s pre-cooked, some vitamins and minerals are lost before it ever hits your plate. Thanks to the heat used during the canning process damaging the chlorophyll, you can also expect it to lose some of its bright green hue, which makes leafy green vegetables a canned food you should avoid. It will still be nutritionally dense, but it won’t pack quite as much of a punch as the fresh stuff. Surprisingly, frozen spinach may be even healthier than fresh, as it’s thought to contain almost four times the amount of fiber, folate, iron, and calcium. We still can’t promise that it will give you super-strength, though.

Mushrooms aren’t one of the most common varieties of canned veggies (or veggie-adjacent produce, as, yes, we know they’re technically a fungus). There may be a good reason why that’s the case. Many consider their texture too slimy, rubbery, or fragile to have the same impact as fresh mushrooms in some dishes. Clare Wilson, Vice President of Culinary R&D at Jason’s Deli, shares this sentiment, which is why she encourages the latter instead. “All mushrooms bring the flavor to any dish, but fresh mushrooms just take it up a notch,” she says. “Fresh mushrooms really bring out that natural umami richness that makes sauces and dishes come to life, and their texture stays hearty and meaty when you sauté or roast them to order.”

While there are practical perks to using canned mushrooms — such as the fact that they store for a lot longer — Wilson adds that there are other benefits to using the fresh variety. “Fresh mushrooms just give you more flexibility in the kitchen,” she explains. “You can control how they are seasoned and cooked, giving you the right texture and flavor balance for each dish. Not to mention, they also give you more visual appeal than canned.” If it’s a showstopper of a dish you’re after, fresh is the best way forward. It’s also worth noting that preserved foods are at a higher risk of botulism, with multiple canned mushroom recalls for this reason over the years.

Yes, carrots are delicious and packed with nutritional perks. But at the time, we can’t deny that cutting and preparing carrots is time-consuming, laborious, and, we’ll say it, a little bit boring. For that reason alone, we’re partial to using canned carrots periodically. However, it turns out that we should probably be using the fresh variety if we want to make the most of their potent vitamins and minerals.

The main reason is that canned carrots are usually pre-cooked and contain much more water than fresh carrots. That means that, yes, they’re lower in calories (as if regular carrots were the most calorie-dense produce in the world), but they’re also lower in fiber. According to Weigh School, every 100 grams of fresh, cooked carrots comes bearing 3 grams of fiber, while canned carrots include just half that number at 1.5 grams. Their calcium, potassium, magnesium, and vitamins A, B6, C, and E contents are all also significantly lower.

Much like carrots, potatoes are a time-consuming food to prepare. That’s what makes the canned variety so useful when producing the likes of stews, casseroles, or pies, where you can easily add the pre-cooked (or at least partially cooked) starchy vegetable straight into the mix of other ingredients.

Like most canned vegetables, these potatoes are preserved for the long haul in water and salt, which means sodium content is again one of their biggest downsides. It also means that their water content is higher. This brings down the calories but comes with the unwanted side effect of diluting the nutritional benefits of your spuds. Per Weigh School, you’ll find less magnesium, vitamins B6 and C, calcium, and thiamin in canned potatoes. At the same time, they typically contain slightly more iron and zinc, meaning they’re not entirely nutritionally inferior. There’s certainly nothing wrong with using canned potatoes, but you may want to weigh up what’s important to you from a nutritional (or, let’s be real, time-saving) standpoint before doing so.

First things first, there are some perks to choosing canned corn over fresh. Not only is it endlessly more convenient to crack open a tin than it is to deal with corn husks, but it’s budget-friendly and, according to a 2002 study by Cornell University, may contain more antioxidants due to the heating process used before the canning process starts.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always the best choice for your dish. Chef Supreme Dow lists corn as one of the vegetables he recommends avoiding in its canned form, once again citing high sodium levels and the fact that the canning process can “also affect the vegetable’s overall texture and taste.” Similarly, if Chef Brooke Williamson does use canned corn, she does so for purposes other than boosting a meal’s nutrition profile. “I would say that nutritional value absolutely gets lost in canned vegetables,” she says. “For example, I have creamed corn in a recipe in my newest cookbook, “Sun-Kissed Cooking: Vegetables Front and Center,” [but] canned corn is used for added texture and creaminess, not necessarily nutrition.” If you opt for canned corn, we already ranked the best options for you (and spoiler alert: Green Giant is our favorite).

Canned beets have an extraordinarily long shelf life, lasting at least two years in the right conditions. That’s an automatic point in its favor, as is the fact that they’re still rich in potassium, dietary fiber, and iron. It also helps that they’re so easy to toss into salads, smoothies, and even boxed cake mix.

In a showdown between fresh and canned beets, however, we have to give the point to the former. The canning process does strip some of the nutritional benefits of beetroot, with even more dietary fiber, phosphorus, potassium, and folate. Once again, the biggest difference is the sodium levels. Beets are naturally very low in sodium, while a cup of canned sodium may contain well over 300 milligrams (via Livestrong). This number may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but considering we already eat far more sodium than we should without realizing, it’s small things like this that can sneakily increase the amount consumed on a daily basis.