The Tenets Of Nutritional Wellness

Michael Pollan summed up the tenets of nutrition best when he said:

Eat Whole Foods.

Not too much.

Mostly plants.

Those are the most valuable lessons food science has taught us.  They are the magic secret to individualized nutritional wellness.

As food and our bodily systems are pretty hard to approximate in a lab, and the myriad variables prevent us from drawing concrete and meaningful conclusions from human studies, we know a lot about individual nutrients and food components, but not much about foods themselves.  Since nutrients don’t naturally occur in isolation, this hasn’t really translated into practical knowledge that individuals can apply to their dietary choices.  And I would argue that food science has contributed to the vilifying of healthy foods, the praise of quasi foods, and the confusion of average folks.

Food science is wonderful, of course, but has it brought us any closer to health than we were in the ’80s?

You see, an apple is not an apple, is not an apple, is not an apple.

The nutritive qualities of an apple are affected by a slew of conditions; from growing conditions like soil quality, tree health, light, water, and their consistency in application, but also chemical treatments, processing, transport, handling, and exposure to elements such as moisture, light, and heat.  This isn’t even all-encompassing.  And all foods and ingredients suffer from the same level of variability.

The idea of knowing about individual nutrients and how much a given food contains is just too much!  Especially if all you want is a healthy snack.

So stop worrying about that stuff. Seriously.

It is good to know where your food came from to aid in speculation on quality and freshness, but unless you have a special interest a farmer is the only one I would really expect to know about the growing conditions, the shipper of transport conditions, a grocer of handling conditions, and a scientist of the nutritional composition.

If you are lucky enough to know such important people in our food system, go ahead and ask, it is interesting stuff!  And if you are getting your food directly from a farmer, that is even better, because these things do matter.  It is just that our food system has otherwise become so convoluted that it is more of a headache than it is worth for the average consumer.

I am going to tell you a little about micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – as we go along, mostly in hopes to quell your fascination with food, but it isn’t necessary for the purpose of eating well.  We will spend more time on macronutrients – proteins, fats, and carbohydrates – because these are the larger components of foods that have more of a tangible effect on health, but also because these are what cause foods to respond to cooking in reliable ways, which we can exploit to make foods more delicious.

But if you want nothing more than to eat a healthful diet, you can refer back to the words of Michael Pollan and think very little about it beyond that.

What is a whole food?  It is a food that is not processed or has been processed very little.  There is usually only one ingredient and if there are a few they are all required, none are fillers, and they are all whole ingredients themselves.

 A good example is a yogurt that is made of milk and active bacterial cultures, this would be a whole food.  Yogurt made of milk solids, skim milk, bacterial cultures, aspartame(sweetener), carrageenan (thickener), potassium sorbate (preservative), etc. is not a whole food, it has been stripped into parts and put back together with additives to make up the difference.  These semi food items don’t seem to act quite like their natural counterparts in our bodies and we don’t fully understand why yet.

How much is not too much?  Well, don’t find a wholefood you like and eat plates of it at the expense of variety.  If you eat a variety of whole foods you will get a good selection of nutrition, eat slowly (because it takes time for the brain to get the message that you are full and relay a message back to stop eating), and eat until you feel full.

Mostly plants?  Yes, in all their forms – vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, grains – but mostly vegetables specifically.

Mostly vegetables, specifically?  Yes.  If we wanted to boil Michael Pollan’s advice down further to the single golden rule of nutrition, the one you just cannot ignore, it would be to eat vegetables, a variety of vegetables.  Unfortunately for those of you that don’t like vegetables, there is no healthy diet that is void of vegetables.  Sorry.

But I like a challenge, and if you don’t like vegetables stay with me.  I am going to distill into you all the cooking knowledge I have gained over the years that have helped me turn whole foods, mostly vegetables, into delicious crowd-pleasers with consistency and ease.

Challenge yourself.  Start thinking whole foods, start thinking variety, start thinking vegetables.