Mini Lesson: Whole Foods

Video Transcript

Categorizing Foods

We tend to categorize things in an effort to make things simpler or easier to understand.  With foods, we can categorize them by the major macronutrient they provide or where the food comes from. These foods are carbs, those are proteins. This is a vegetable and that is a grain. These categorizations make it simpler to tell someone what they should eat, but it does not fully capture the complexities of the foods that our bodies need.

Complex Nature of Foods

True, a beet would be considered a root vegetable and a carbohydrate, but it is so much more than that. The carbohydrates from beets are a combination of sugars, fiber, and a little starch. There is a trace amount of fat and it has some different amino acids as well. It is a great way to get folate with a few other B vitamins, a little vitamin C, and a variety of minerals. And those are just the nutritional compounds that have been deemed as necessary nutrients. 

In addition to all of that, plant foods also contain phytonutrients that will not show up on a nutrition facts label. Phytonutrients are a wide variety of plant nutrients that may not be necessary to sustain life, but they support health by improving cellular function to promote healthy skin, heart, eyes, liver, brain, you name it and there is likely a phytonutrient that helps with it. They can also help reduce inflammation in the body, fight against microbes, and serve as food for good bacteria to maintain a healthy microbiome. In beets, there are phytosterols that help to reduce cholesterol in the body, betaine and betalains that support the liver and detoxification, and carotenoids that support healthy eyes and skin, and improve immune function.

Effect of Processing on Nutrients

Of course, the amount of many of those nutrients that you actually get from eating beets is going to depend on how they are prepared or processed. Fresh out of the garden and eaten raw will be different than beets that are roasted, boiled, or those that come from a can. Modern processing methods are designed primarily to extend shelf life and keep food from spoiling before it can be purchased and eaten. However, many processing methods can also influence the amount of nutrients and phytonutrients that are available in a food by the time it is eaten. How the nutritional content will change depends on the type of food and how it is processed, but overall, foods tend to be more inherently nutritious when they have undergone the least amount of processing.  There are some exceptions, but not many. 

This is also true for how the food is prepared at home. Peeling the skins off the vegetables can remove many nutrients, particularly phytonutrients. Excess heat can destroy certain vitamins and phytonutrients. This does not mean that we should never cook anything or cut it up, just try to keep the processing and preparation to the minimum necessary so we can get as many beneficial nutrients as possible. 

Benefit of Whole Foods 

We may have a fairly good grasp on the broad strokes of nutrition, but there is still so much that we have left to learn. As much as we want it to be as simple as eating a certain amount of macro or micronutrients, or eating a certain number of servings from this category or that, there are times with this reductionist thinking comes back to haunt us. Many of the processed foods and supplements available today were designed to meet this type of checklist approach to nutrition, but we often see that people do much better when getting those same nutrients from whole food sources.  Though we may not be able to explain it fully, this demonstrates that there are still benefits to whole, minimally processed foods that we may not yet understand. Until we do, fresh, minimally processed foods are usually the best option when available.