Eat food or nutrients, your choice

In a November 2007 academic review, a University of Minnesota Public Health professor concluded that food as a whole, as opposed to specific nutrients, may be key to having a healthy diet. This idea is contrary to consumer belief and popular practice in food industry and government, where marketers and regulators tend to focus on total fat, carbohydrate and protein and on specific vitamins and added supplements in food products, not the food items as a whole. The review, which studied the concept of food synergy, argues that consumers focus should shift toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand nutrition in regard to a healthy human body.

Most dietitians when they promote say, “food first, supplements second” for good reason. There are numerous studies that show the synergistic effects of foods. For example, when avocados are eaten as partof a salad, the absorption of beneficial carotenoids is increased dramatically or when herbs and spices are added to dishes, the total antioxidant capacity of the meal skyrockets by as much as 200%.

Not only are the nutrition recommendations now beginning to focus on promoting whole foods, researchers are now looking into food patterns and total diets to see which are associated with the best health outcomes.

There are still instances when enriched and fortified foods really help fill nutrient gaps, such as folic acid fortification of grains; calcium fortification of foods and beverages. These fortified foods play key roles in the diet and we are better off with them than without them.

The bottom line: Eat whole foods as much as possible and use healthful fortified options to make up for shortfall nutrients.

Sometime in 2009 a book titled "Food and Nutrients in Disease Management," a groundbreaking medical nutrition book to help doctors

treat disease will be published. It’s the first medical nutrition book to emphasize whole foods over isolated nutrients.

The 650-page reference guide, written by a doctor from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health draws on both traditional and alternative approaches, will address numerous medical conditions ranging from heart disease and diabetes to male infertility, kidney stones and autism.

The innovative concept is for your primary-care doctor to test your blood for nutritional deficiencies and then providing a prescription for a certain food, based on your genes, your pre-existing conditions and the prescription drugs you take. The book will also cover food and drug interactions, nutrient laboratory testing, how dietary patterns alter medication dosing, and adverse effects from certain herbs and supplements. The interaction between nutrients and prescription medications is significant but not well communicated by doctors says the author, who has practiced

nutritional medicine on every continent. The bad news is it is designed to treat sick people instead of helping healthy people stay healthy by eating healthy foods in the first place. But the book’s emphasis on whole foods is encouraging.

Natural, whole-foods, in season and as “locally-grown” as possible preferably free-range and organically fed for animals and organically-grown plant foods are the foundation of a healthy diet. The amount of variety is also crucial, and we should also take a look at the quality of food. The health of our food depends on the health of our soils. It has been documented that organic fruits and vegetables have a significantly higher nutrient content. Food grown in the same chemically fertilized soils year after year must reflect a continued depletion of quality and a huge lack of the diverse phytonutrients that are now shown to be necessary for good health. Here are links to two references showing the relationship between organically raised produce and higher nutrient content.
http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=faq&dbid=17#Health and http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/Arun/Organic%2 0foods%20in%20relation%20to%20nutrition%20and%20health% 20key%20fact%85.pdf
The point is that to the degree that soils contain the needed nutrients so will the plants grown in them. Organic farming methods enrich soil with a much broader life support system than non-organic farming.

New evidence confirms the nutritional superiority of planted organic foods. The new report provides strong evidence that organic foods are definitely more nutrient dense for the most important of 11 nutrients. Across the 11 nutrients, organic foods contained on average 25% higher concentrations of nutrients. The report points out that more than 40 new studies have been published since 2001.

The dramatic increase in high-quality studies in recent years has changed what the body of science shows on the nutrition of organic foods. Until a few years ago, scientists could say "We simply don't know" when asked if organic foods are, in general, more nutritious. Nutritionists and scientists who use that answer now are not current with the literature.

This holds true to harvests of aquatic foods. Salmon caught from the wild are nutritionally superior to those fish-farmed salmon. Similarly, difficult to catch wild bangus (milkfish) are nutritionally preferred to pond-raised bangus, and bangus capable of bottom feeding are still better than bangus raised in cages.

With healthy soil and organic farming to grow healthy productive plants we can expect harvests of foods packed with nutrition. But we still need help from nature’s pollinators, primarily honey bees, help that is threatened to diminish due to environmental pollution. The bees are vanishing, drowning in a sea of electromagnetic radiation

Consider breakfast cereals that claim to supply 100 percent RDA of a slew of vitamins and minerals (restored after super-processing stripped them out). In theory you need not eat anything else. Consider again the practice of putting nutrients in foods that don’t naturally have them, such as orange juice with added calcium. It’s like saying that infant formula can possibly be equal to breastmilk. There is no way to capture, in a vitamin capsule, what secrets there are in whole plant foods.

Natural whole foods is best and they should be locally grown, free range, and made affordable to the thousands of people who are low income. An excellent article written by Michael Pollan published in the NYT has a main message: eat food, not too much, mostly plants and veer away from a nutrient-focused diet.

Epigenetics is looking at how foods influence fetal development, an interesting topic attempting to reveal the interactions among the chemicals we ingest and our body, trying to understand the potential for altering the functions of genes with food biochemistry and therefore making us more likely to prevent or suffer a disease.

As adults we should understand what our individual body needs when we make food choices. That would eliminate excesses and the overfed yet undernourished condition of many people who reach for the bottle of pills.

But you need more than food. Walk, Laugh, don’t smoke – a holistic approach will keep you healthy

Certainly there is a place for supplements needed to fill specific nutrient gaps. But with a report basing the recommendation “Choose nutrient-rich foods and drinks instead of dietary supplements” on all available sound studies reviewed by a panel of 21 international experts, the idea that food is best is now more than just a hunch. Check out the report here . If you must take supplements also get the full range of nutrient forms (for example gamma-tocopherol instead of only the alpha-tocopherol in most vitamin-E supplements), and avoid the “if some is good, more is better” mistake that comes so easily.

Is there more to a carrot than beta carotene? Is lycopene the best we get from tomatoes? And when we heap our plates with salmon, are we serving up something other than omega-3s?

For years the scientific community has viewed individual vitamins and nutrients as the best that food has to offer. Nutrition studies have isolated beta carotene, calcium, vitamin E and lycopene, among other nutrients, in order to study their health benefits in the body.

But now, after several vitamin studies have produced disappointing results, there’s a growing belief that food is more than just a sum of its nutrient parts. Writing for the journal Nutrition Reviews, a University professor of epidemiology argues that nutrition researchers should focus on whole foods rather than only on single nutrients. He believes that nutrition science needs to consider the effects of “food synergy,'’ the notion that the health benefits of certain foods aren’t likely to come from a single nutrient but rather combinations of compounds that work better together than apart. Every food is much more complicated than any drug, extremely complicated.

The narrow focus on the health effects of single nutrients stems from the earliest days of nutrition research. In 1937, two scientists won a Nobel Prize for identifying vitamin C as the essential component in citrus fruit that prevents scurvy. The finding spurred interest by the scientific community to study other biologically active nutrients in foods.

For as long as observational studies have shown that diets rich in fruits and vegetables, unsaturated fat and fish, among other things, are associated with better health, nutrition researchers have been busily deconstructing these foods to identify the most potent nutrients. For example, vitamin E has been widely studied as a heart protector.

But attributing the broad health benefits of a diet to a single compound has proven to be misguided. Several studies have suggested an association between diets rich in beta carotene and vitamin A, for instance, and lower risk for many types of cancer. But in a well-known 1994 Finnish study, smokers who took beta carotene were found to have an 18 percent higher incidence of lung cancer. In 1996, researchers gave beta carotene and vitamin A to smokers and workers exposed to asbestos. But the trial had to be stopped because the people taking the combined therapy showed markedly higher risks for lung cancer and heart attacks.

Since then, studies of other vitamins, notably vitamins E and B, have also failed to show a benefit. Manufacturers say the problem is that vitamins are too often examined in sick people while the real benefit may be in preventing disease. The better explanation may simply be that food synergy, rather than the biological activity of a few key nutrients, is the real reason that certain diets, like those consumed in the parts of the Mediterranean and Japan, appear to lower the risks of heart disease and other health problems. Vitamins and minerals isolated in pill or capsule form do not contain phytochemicals, plant sterols and anti-oxidants that would naturally be present in whole foods

Important to note in the discussion of nutrition-from-foods is the impact of modern cultivation methods on nutrient content. Large-scale conventional growing methods deplete minerals and other nutrients from the soil, and antioxidants don’t form as readily. Conventional foods, both produce and animal products don’t contain enough vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, and other synergistic unknowns to sustain health. So even if you do eat your veggies every day, you won’t be getting optimum nutrition. Organic, on the other hand, does contain the elements we need in sufficient quantities. Ideally, our nutrition should come from the foods we eat - after all, that’s how the human body is programmed to get its nutrition. If you eat a varied, fresh, organic diet, you won’t need to take supplements. But if that lifestyle is not available, or not feasible for you, supplements, while imperfect, are better than nothing.

Another important part of a healthy diet is to subtract harmful additives, especially petroleum-based chemicals like food dyes, artificial flavorings, aspartame, and many, many more. They have been found to trigger many health, behavior and learning problems. People who focus on healthy food choices generally eat fewer of them, but may overlook the fact that they are being exposed through things like toothpaste, mouthwash, vitamins, medicine, topical lotions and cosmetics. And since most fragrances today are derived from petroleum, that’s another source of exposure. The non-profit Feingold Association shares information on how to find the things you want while you steer clear of the worst of the additives.

The other thing to remember about organic foods is what is NOT in them.

There are reduced levels of organophosphates from fertilizers, and many other chemicals, in whole, fresh foods. And what we need to remember is that many toxins and carcinogens are fat soluble or stored in body fat stores. Therefore, reducing your body fat is like emptying a toxic waste dump. Less fat, less potential carcinogens stored thus reducing health risks. A great motivator for exercise!

The other thing to consider is the packaging. Whole natural foods are packaged in a fibrous outer coating or skin that is often loaded with phytochemicals and fiber that are excellent for your health. Fiber actually provides the vehicle, or transportation medium, that allows cholesterol to be removed from your body.

Processed foods stripped of these important nutrients, fill you, but don’t feed your body needs.

Plant foods that are non-organic have pesticides and non-nutritious waxy coatings sprayed on them, which most people will not want to deal with - removal takes knowledge, time and effort.

Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D who has been teaching and writing on whole foods for more than 30 years, through her books such as Food and Healing, says while the oversimplification approach has its merits, by itself it is not enough. Dr Jacobs’ “food synergy” concept, the view of the whole as more than the sum of its parts, is the missing piece. The new science of complexity totally supports that point of view.

Supplements are medicine, and have their role, but they are not food. Not even “whole food supplements” are food. They are not required for healthy living for everyone.

So, what to eat? Whole, fresh, natural, real food, grown with organic methods and natural husbandry, non-GMO. Michael Pollan (reference above) said it best in his January NY Times article, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Everyone should memorize that line.

Saturday, April 12, 2008