Edit: I think it’s more accurate to say that vegetable deprivation is extremely harmful. It’s not like eating additional vegetables leads to additional health!
Psychologically speaking, it is helpful to think of eating vegetables as the default state which we actively deviate from, not a thing which we actively do to stay healthy. That’s why I like words such as “sedentism”—it makes you feel like you are actively harming your body rather than passively allowing it to be harmed, similar to “alcoholism”.
Methodology seems legit to me, the data is from a reliable source, and it also more or less conforms to what I’d intuitively expect.
Do keep in mind that this is nutrient density per weight, not nutrient density per calorie. How much of a food you can eat will depend more on the latter, and I’m guessing fruits have more calorie per gram then veggies (making vegetables even more important)
That is a surprisingly well done guide there. As someone who just today went online to check whether my (rather repetitive) diet meets basic nutrition guidelines, I am surprised to find anything approaching a thorough, easy-to-use presentation of this data. Everything out there seems to be aimed at calorie-counting or high-fructose corn syrup scare. It’s almost as if the internet’s nutrition websites weren’t designed for munchkining your diet!
On that note, can anyone recommend a good tool, database, website, or whatever for helping one to make good dietary choices? I’m talking about things like noticing that I should be replacing kidney beans with lentils*, that kind of low-level thing.
*Made up example, I have no idea how the two compare.
It’s almost as if the internet’s nutrition websites weren’t designed for munchkining your diet!
This is because while the field of nutrition is currently at the point where it can prevent serious deficiency (a relatively simple matter of making sure all the important nutrients pass through your guts in sufficient quantity), it’s not at the point where it can confidently point to the optimal diet for the average human.
Everyone agrees that fruits and vegetables are generally positive. Everyone agrees that heavily processed foods are generally bad. By the way, Calorie counting is a reasonable path to weight loss and weight gain (though there are other methods) - and everyone agrees that being over/under weight is generally bad. That’s about where the agreement ends.
Tackling the harder problems of nutrition would require us to understand more about human metabolism, nutrient absorption, non-nutrient factors like anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, natural toxins (never forget that being eaten is not in the genetic interests of most plants), gut flora, immunological function, and things of that sort.
Just to give you a sense of the chaos here: there are nutritionists who make a case that you shouldn’t eat beans or lentils at all. These same folks say that while you are at it stop eating grains in general, and make up the calories with animal fat. At the opposite side of the spectrum, there are nutritionists who say that the optimal diet contains almost zero meat (see—china study). All this confusion is before you add in ethical complications about sustainable food and animal rights.
If you both these strands of advice simultaneously and cut out grains, legumes, and animal fat … at that point you’ll have to start to getting rather creative in order to get sufficient calories, and you’re probably pretty far off from optimal at this point.
I could take your request and give you a professional nutritionist’s dietary recommendations, but the nutritionist I recommend will necessarily conform to my own stance and you’d be foolish to trust anyone on expert opinion when expert opinion is so diverse. From your perspective, my opinion that the optimal strategy is to model your diet off of what humans ate during the paleolithic would constitute a random shot in a space of common schools of thought—I think Paleolithic diets have a relatively high likelihood of being better than almost all diets which became possible post-agriculture, but as far as you’re concerned who the hell am I? Nutrition isn’t even my primary area of study, and even if it was, taking the recommendation of a random expert is probably worse than taking the recommendation an expert who was recommended by a random non-expert
Anyway, aside from general purpose tools like google scholar, cochrane reviews, etc… http://examine.com is one of the most user-friendly primary source databases I’ve come across geared specifically to nutrition. Unfortunately, it’s mostly about supplements and single nutrients rather than whole foods, and that’s largely because we can be more confident when talking about single molecules than we can about entire foods. On a less empirical note, I’ve got a generally favorable opinion of the blog posts from http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ which clued me in to several things I hadn’t considered before (offal & bones, Vitamin K2, etc) and lean on the practical side. If you prefer to listen to people who are prominent in academia, Loren Cordain has a blog http://thepaleodiet.com/ and several influential papers.
How confident is the consensus regarding whether one absolutely should meet the basic FDA minimums for all nutrients/ This would be my first approach towards ‘munchkining’ - at least looking to see whether I have any deficiencies.
I’m not sure. You’ll have to research each nutrient individually—each nutrient is its own little research project.
I’m fairly confident that the optimum amount of vitamin D is probably much higher than the recommended dose. You can take that information into account as you see fit when judging the FDA recommended doses. My guess is that they generally tend to be too low. This might be ignorance, or it might be a precautionary measure to prevent supplement overdose—I’m not sure.
Being of the evolutionary-nutrition school of thought, I’d say the first place to look for deficiencies are the places where our ancestors would have gotten more than us even if we ate optimally given the resources we have. That means Vitamin D (we’re sun deprived) Vitamin K2 (we grow up sterile so our gut flora do not synthesize enough) and Omega 3 (grain fed meat is lacking this).
Further deficiencies would probably depend on your individual diet and physiology. And by the way, if you are going to put lots of effort into being healthy, be sure to direct a good portion of that effort into optimizing exercise regimen and stress regulation, both of which are probably more important than diet.
Most FDA RDAs are to avoid a state of deficiency. Example: If you don’t eat enough Vitamin C, you’ll get scurvy. So eat at least this much vitamin C to avoid scurvy—there’s the RDA.
There are a few examples of nutrients which are naturally produced in the body, but supplementation provides a solid benefit beyond what you’d expect from satisfying a deficiency. Vitamin D is a good example of this: I’ve been taking 10,000IU Vitamin D (~17xRDA) and I feel MUCH better. Creatine is another good one, where you will produce enough to avoid a deficiency state, but additional supplementation significantly improves performance.
The kicker is that everyone is essentially individual in how they respond to things. Some people react really well to a paleo diet (ie high meat, low starch), whereas some people respond very well to a vegan/high-starch diet. Some people don’t respond to creatine or fish oil supplementation, and some people are markedly worse off without it. So approach the question methodically: Change one variable at a time and record how you feel.
Actually, the FDA RDA for Vitamin C provides enough of this (non-fat-soluble, and therefore very poorly stored in the body) vitamin that your reserve, at equilibrium, will get you through thirty days of complete deprivation with no symptoms. Which is nice, but means that if your intake is below the RDA but decently reliable you will still be fine. I’d be surprised if my intake were above 30% RDA on average, but I have never had symptoms of scurvy.
I second the “individual response” paragraph. A lot of people say they feel hungry and unsatisfied after a full meal of mostly starch. I feel great after eating starch but feel hungry and unsatisfied after a full meal of mostly meat.
Every plant (and every part of the plant) is going to have a different micro- and macronutrient profile. “Healthy” food has a lot of micronutrients (ie vitamins, minerals) and a generally desirable blend of macronutrients (protein, carbs [simple/complex/fiber], fats [saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated {omega-6, omega-9, omega 3 (ALA, DHA, EPA)}] jesus sorry for the nesting). “Healthy” isn’t a goal but rather a descriptor of things that tend to promote certain goals, generally weight loss or reducing symptoms of cardiovascular disease.
Broccoli has a lot of fiber, micronutrients, and a pretty respectable net carb vs protein ratio. It’s pretty much always a good idea to eat broccoli regardless of your health goals. You could say that broccoli has a very favorable calories:nutrients ratio, which you might refer to as nutrient density. An apple has more calories and less protein, micronutrients, and fiber, so you could say that an apple has a worse calorie:nutrients ratio, and is less nutrient dense.
I’d imagine that most of the benefit of vegetables comes from the high nutrient density as compared to fruits, grains, legumes, etc. A potato has less micronutrients than broccoli and over twice as many calories.
It (at least, the abstract, the rest is paywalled) deals with “vegetables and fruit” as a single category, not a disjoint union of two. I notice that in the list of subject classifications for the article, one of the classes is “fruit and vegetables”.
The everyday distinction between the two is not relevant to nutrition, and there is no scientific distinction. In the technical discourse of the laboratory, some plant organs are called “fruits”, “nuts”, or various other things, but none are called “vegetables”.
The questions to ask are about which fruits and vegetables contain which nutrients.
I think it depends on which nutrients you’re trying to actually substitute. Fructose seems to have different effects on insulin and digestion than the starches you might find in a potato, and vitamins can break down when cooked so fruits might be a better source than vegetables which are usually cooked.
micronutrients are a subset of “vitamins and minerals” that we only need in small amounts. Your body uses them for physiological processes, but doesn’t make them. If you don’t get them, the physiological processes they are involved in stop working.
Oxygen is a very oxidizing agent. It used to be a metabolic biproduct which was toxic to most life on earth, until one branch of the tree of life evolved to use it for metabolism. We and most other successful organisms are descended from that branch. Even though we’ve evolved defenses to counter oxygen’s harmful effects, it can still harm us. Using oxygen creates byproducts which are also oxidizing agents. These often go and react with other chemicals in your body, in places they aren’t supposed to. This is called “oxidative damage”. Anti-oxidants counter this effect—usually by making the oxidizing agent react with the anti-oxidant rather than with important parts of your body. But it’s complicated, and you can’t necessarily always just isolate a bunch of them and swallow them. That might actually hurt you.
Doesn’t have the same effect. There was a study where they gave one group Vitamin C & one group ate oranges. The group that got the Vitamin C had no change in Antioxidant activity; only the orange-eating group saw the benefit. Probably there are some other factors involved that we just haven’t figured out yet. Eventually maybe reductionism will solve this one, but it hasn’t yet.
That’s an interesting study, but they also mention that if you could obtain the other chemicals from the oranges (perhaps the flavanones and carotenoids) separately you could get the same effect as eating the fruit. Obviously, oranges are not just vitamin C.
It’s true that we don’t yet know all the biochemical pathways of nutrition. My question isn’t about current knowledge.
Isn’t it tautological that if you fully understood the health-related properties of an orange, and engineered a food that had all the nutritional properties of an orange and yet was not an orange, then eating the engineered food would be functionally identical to eating an orange from a health related perspective?
Doesn’t the fact that the definition of “orange” isn’t ontologically fundamental imply that this feat is possible?
If we could do everything fruits and vegetables do through other means, then it goes without saying that we wouldn’t need to eat fruits or vegetables.
The question is can we engineer such a food. I know many people who would say that we simply can’t do it with current or near-term technology (like, say, in twenty years).
Whole fruit/vegetables act as a sustained release delivery system for their micronutrients, so even supplementing all the relevant micronutrients may not perfectly replicate fruit/vegetables if they’re delivered as bare molecules.
It would depend on what other means are. I’m guessing you’re thinking along the lines of supplements and artificial meals?
There’s still stuff like ratio, absorption, bio-availability, and physical stuff (fiber, etc) to think about. It’s not all about getting the nutrients.
We don’t really know all the nutrients. The line between “nutrient” and “medication” gets a bit blurred, right? Plant based anti-inflammatory compounds aren’t nutrients in that they aren’t part of your metabolic chemical reactions, nor will you die without them, but they are still good for you and can stave of disease. “Medication’ isn’t necessarily the right word, but i don’t know if we have a word for that.
I’m sure that something could be equal or superior, I’m just not sure whether or not anything we currently have is equal or superior.
Yes, Extremely strong—it’s among the extremely few statements which are uncontroversial in nutrition.
google scholar → vegetables health -->
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/3/475s.full
--> assorted references
Edit: I think it’s more accurate to say that vegetable deprivation is extremely harmful. It’s not like eating additional vegetables leads to additional health!
Psychologically speaking, it is helpful to think of eating vegetables as the default state which we actively deviate from, not a thing which we actively do to stay healthy. That’s why I like words such as “sedentism”—it makes you feel like you are actively harming your body rather than passively allowing it to be harmed, similar to “alcoholism”.
I was wondering whether fruits and vegetables were substitutable for each other. The article seems to leave the question open.
Did a very cursory search, didn’t find anything professional. Here’s an amateur meta-analysis that attempts to tackle it: http://scienceofmom.com/2011/12/22/fruits-vs-veggies-are-they-nutritionally-equivalent/#more-724
Methodology seems legit to me, the data is from a reliable source, and it also more or less conforms to what I’d intuitively expect.
Do keep in mind that this is nutrient density per weight, not nutrient density per calorie. How much of a food you can eat will depend more on the latter, and I’m guessing fruits have more calorie per gram then veggies (making vegetables even more important)
That is a surprisingly well done guide there. As someone who just today went online to check whether my (rather repetitive) diet meets basic nutrition guidelines, I am surprised to find anything approaching a thorough, easy-to-use presentation of this data. Everything out there seems to be aimed at calorie-counting or high-fructose corn syrup scare. It’s almost as if the internet’s nutrition websites weren’t designed for munchkining your diet!
On that note, can anyone recommend a good tool, database, website, or whatever for helping one to make good dietary choices? I’m talking about things like noticing that I should be replacing kidney beans with lentils*, that kind of low-level thing.
*Made up example, I have no idea how the two compare.
This is because while the field of nutrition is currently at the point where it can prevent serious deficiency (a relatively simple matter of making sure all the important nutrients pass through your guts in sufficient quantity), it’s not at the point where it can confidently point to the optimal diet for the average human.
Everyone agrees that fruits and vegetables are generally positive. Everyone agrees that heavily processed foods are generally bad. By the way, Calorie counting is a reasonable path to weight loss and weight gain (though there are other methods) - and everyone agrees that being over/under weight is generally bad. That’s about where the agreement ends.
Tackling the harder problems of nutrition would require us to understand more about human metabolism, nutrient absorption, non-nutrient factors like anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, natural toxins (never forget that being eaten is not in the genetic interests of most plants), gut flora, immunological function, and things of that sort.
Just to give you a sense of the chaos here: there are nutritionists who make a case that you shouldn’t eat beans or lentils at all. These same folks say that while you are at it stop eating grains in general, and make up the calories with animal fat. At the opposite side of the spectrum, there are nutritionists who say that the optimal diet contains almost zero meat (see—china study). All this confusion is before you add in ethical complications about sustainable food and animal rights.
If you both these strands of advice simultaneously and cut out grains, legumes, and animal fat … at that point you’ll have to start to getting rather creative in order to get sufficient calories, and you’re probably pretty far off from optimal at this point.
I could take your request and give you a professional nutritionist’s dietary recommendations, but the nutritionist I recommend will necessarily conform to my own stance and you’d be foolish to trust anyone on expert opinion when expert opinion is so diverse. From your perspective, my opinion that the optimal strategy is to model your diet off of what humans ate during the paleolithic would constitute a random shot in a space of common schools of thought—I think Paleolithic diets have a relatively high likelihood of being better than almost all diets which became possible post-agriculture, but as far as you’re concerned who the hell am I? Nutrition isn’t even my primary area of study, and even if it was, taking the recommendation of a random expert is probably worse than taking the recommendation an expert who was recommended by a random non-expert
Anyway, aside from general purpose tools like google scholar, cochrane reviews, etc… http://examine.com is one of the most user-friendly primary source databases I’ve come across geared specifically to nutrition. Unfortunately, it’s mostly about supplements and single nutrients rather than whole foods, and that’s largely because we can be more confident when talking about single molecules than we can about entire foods. On a less empirical note, I’ve got a generally favorable opinion of the blog posts from http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ which clued me in to several things I hadn’t considered before (offal & bones, Vitamin K2, etc) and lean on the practical side. If you prefer to listen to people who are prominent in academia, Loren Cordain has a blog http://thepaleodiet.com/ and several influential papers.
Great points—thanks!
How confident is the consensus regarding whether one absolutely should meet the basic FDA minimums for all nutrients/ This would be my first approach towards ‘munchkining’ - at least looking to see whether I have any deficiencies.
I’m not sure. You’ll have to research each nutrient individually—each nutrient is its own little research project.
I’m fairly confident that the optimum amount of vitamin D is probably much higher than the recommended dose. You can take that information into account as you see fit when judging the FDA recommended doses. My guess is that they generally tend to be too low. This might be ignorance, or it might be a precautionary measure to prevent supplement overdose—I’m not sure.
Being of the evolutionary-nutrition school of thought, I’d say the first place to look for deficiencies are the places where our ancestors would have gotten more than us even if we ate optimally given the resources we have. That means Vitamin D (we’re sun deprived) Vitamin K2 (we grow up sterile so our gut flora do not synthesize enough) and Omega 3 (grain fed meat is lacking this).
Further deficiencies would probably depend on your individual diet and physiology. And by the way, if you are going to put lots of effort into being healthy, be sure to direct a good portion of that effort into optimizing exercise regimen and stress regulation, both of which are probably more important than diet.
Most FDA RDAs are to avoid a state of deficiency. Example: If you don’t eat enough Vitamin C, you’ll get scurvy. So eat at least this much vitamin C to avoid scurvy—there’s the RDA.
There are a few examples of nutrients which are naturally produced in the body, but supplementation provides a solid benefit beyond what you’d expect from satisfying a deficiency. Vitamin D is a good example of this: I’ve been taking 10,000IU Vitamin D (~17xRDA) and I feel MUCH better. Creatine is another good one, where you will produce enough to avoid a deficiency state, but additional supplementation significantly improves performance.
The kicker is that everyone is essentially individual in how they respond to things. Some people react really well to a paleo diet (ie high meat, low starch), whereas some people respond very well to a vegan/high-starch diet. Some people don’t respond to creatine or fish oil supplementation, and some people are markedly worse off without it. So approach the question methodically: Change one variable at a time and record how you feel.
Actually, the FDA RDA for Vitamin C provides enough of this (non-fat-soluble, and therefore very poorly stored in the body) vitamin that your reserve, at equilibrium, will get you through thirty days of complete deprivation with no symptoms. Which is nice, but means that if your intake is below the RDA but decently reliable you will still be fine. I’d be surprised if my intake were above 30% RDA on average, but I have never had symptoms of scurvy.
I second the “individual response” paragraph. A lot of people say they feel hungry and unsatisfied after a full meal of mostly starch. I feel great after eating starch but feel hungry and unsatisfied after a full meal of mostly meat.
I don’t think that’s true. As far as I know, they are largely based on normal consumption from a few decades ago.
There’s nothing like having something to protect. Or possibly, there’s nothing like having a science background and something to protect.
Every plant (and every part of the plant) is going to have a different micro- and macronutrient profile. “Healthy” food has a lot of micronutrients (ie vitamins, minerals) and a generally desirable blend of macronutrients (protein, carbs [simple/complex/fiber], fats [saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated {omega-6, omega-9, omega 3 (ALA, DHA, EPA)}] jesus sorry for the nesting). “Healthy” isn’t a goal but rather a descriptor of things that tend to promote certain goals, generally weight loss or reducing symptoms of cardiovascular disease.
Broccoli has a lot of fiber, micronutrients, and a pretty respectable net carb vs protein ratio. It’s pretty much always a good idea to eat broccoli regardless of your health goals. You could say that broccoli has a very favorable calories:nutrients ratio, which you might refer to as nutrient density. An apple has more calories and less protein, micronutrients, and fiber, so you could say that an apple has a worse calorie:nutrients ratio, and is less nutrient dense.
I’d imagine that most of the benefit of vegetables comes from the high nutrient density as compared to fruits, grains, legumes, etc. A potato has less micronutrients than broccoli and over twice as many calories.
It (at least, the abstract, the rest is paywalled) deals with “vegetables and fruit” as a single category, not a disjoint union of two. I notice that in the list of subject classifications for the article, one of the classes is “fruit and vegetables”.
The everyday distinction between the two is not relevant to nutrition, and there is no scientific distinction. In the technical discourse of the laboratory, some plant organs are called “fruits”, “nuts”, or various other things, but none are called “vegetables”.
The questions to ask are about which fruits and vegetables contain which nutrients.
I think it depends on which nutrients you’re trying to actually substitute. Fructose seems to have different effects on insulin and digestion than the starches you might find in a potato, and vitamins can break down when cooked so fruits might be a better source than vegetables which are usually cooked.
Some very basic questions given my complete dearth of knowledge:
What are micro-nutrients and anti-oxidants? Why are they good?
What is the minimum quantity of vegetables a normal adult would need to get the benefits described? Do they scale at all with increased consumption?
micronutrients are a subset of “vitamins and minerals” that we only need in small amounts. Your body uses them for physiological processes, but doesn’t make them. If you don’t get them, the physiological processes they are involved in stop working.
Oxygen is a very oxidizing agent. It used to be a metabolic biproduct which was toxic to most life on earth, until one branch of the tree of life evolved to use it for metabolism. We and most other successful organisms are descended from that branch. Even though we’ve evolved defenses to counter oxygen’s harmful effects, it can still harm us. Using oxygen creates byproducts which are also oxidizing agents. These often go and react with other chemicals in your body, in places they aren’t supposed to. This is called “oxidative damage”. Anti-oxidants counter this effect—usually by making the oxidizing agent react with the anti-oxidant rather than with important parts of your body. But it’s complicated, and you can’t necessarily always just isolate a bunch of them and swallow them. That might actually hurt you.
But what if you could obtain the nutrients available in vegetables through other means?
Doesn’t have the same effect. There was a study where they gave one group Vitamin C & one group ate oranges. The group that got the Vitamin C had no change in Antioxidant activity; only the orange-eating group saw the benefit. Probably there are some other factors involved that we just haven’t figured out yet. Eventually maybe reductionism will solve this one, but it hasn’t yet.
Here’s an article about the study in case I remembered incorrectly: http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070416/full/news070416-15.html
That’s an interesting study, but they also mention that if you could obtain the other chemicals from the oranges (perhaps the flavanones and carotenoids) separately you could get the same effect as eating the fruit. Obviously, oranges are not just vitamin C.
It’s true that we don’t yet know all the biochemical pathways of nutrition. My question isn’t about current knowledge.
Wait, what exactly are we discussing here?
Isn’t it tautological that if you fully understood the health-related properties of an orange, and engineered a food that had all the nutritional properties of an orange and yet was not an orange, then eating the engineered food would be functionally identical to eating an orange from a health related perspective?
Doesn’t the fact that the definition of “orange” isn’t ontologically fundamental imply that this feat is possible?
If we could do everything fruits and vegetables do through other means, then it goes without saying that we wouldn’t need to eat fruits or vegetables.
The question is can we engineer such a food. I know many people who would say that we simply can’t do it with current or near-term technology (like, say, in twenty years).
I don’t think technology is the limiting factor so much as knowing what it is about apples (or other foods) that makes them healthful.
If we actually knew how our bodies worked and what they needed, we could probably make optimally healthy foods right now.
Whole fruit/vegetables act as a sustained release delivery system for their micronutrients, so even supplementing all the relevant micronutrients may not perfectly replicate fruit/vegetables if they’re delivered as bare molecules.
Perhaps we could engineer ‘sustained release delivery systems’ with properties far better than any fruit.
It would depend on what other means are. I’m guessing you’re thinking along the lines of supplements and artificial meals?
There’s still stuff like ratio, absorption, bio-availability, and physical stuff (fiber, etc) to think about. It’s not all about getting the nutrients.
We don’t really know all the nutrients. The line between “nutrient” and “medication” gets a bit blurred, right? Plant based anti-inflammatory compounds aren’t nutrients in that they aren’t part of your metabolic chemical reactions, nor will you die without them, but they are still good for you and can stave of disease. “Medication’ isn’t necessarily the right word, but i don’t know if we have a word for that.
I’m sure that something could be equal or superior, I’m just not sure whether or not anything we currently have is equal or superior.
It would not change the fact that you can get those nutrients from vegetables.