carrots are a recent addition, and i'm eating them chopped, which....everything i'm reading says that the best thing you can do is cut plants into the smallest pieces possible. so, try to cut your carrots up.
but, should you cook them to release the carotenoids?
that would appear to be true for tomatoes, and it would appear to be true for broccoli. but, careful - it's not true for carrots:
In contrast, β-carotene retention of cooked carrot, crown daisy, perilla leaf, and zucchini was lower than the raw samples. Our results agree with those of a previous study, which reported to a decrease in β-carotene in carrots after boiling [34]. This low thermal stability of β-carotene observed for carrot could be due to the different intracellular location of β-carotene. Carotene in carrots was found to be located in crystalline chromoplasts with membranes rich in polar lipids.
so, heat appears to degrade the beta-carotene in carrots. you want to avoid that...
instead, you want to eat them raw, but chopped up as much as you can - maybe even blended, or juiced. i'm wondering if i shouldn't go for carrot juice, instead. it's just that you're going to get it so processed at the store, and i can't afford to go through a pound of carrots in a juicer every night.
what about peppers?
peppers are sneaky, because you may want to cook them to release the vitamin a, but in the process destroy the vitamin c. i'm eating them mostly for the c, so i want them raw. if you're eating them for the a, you may want to rethink that.
we can at least ferment cellulose, in the gut. we can't even do that for chitin.
but, if you want to ignore me and take a chance on mushrooms, you basically have to grind them up into a fine powder for them to maybe be worthwhile at all. if chitin is that much worse than cellulose, and we have problems with cellulose as it is, you can imagine how much worse chitin is.