Here’s something that I’ve mentioned before (if not here, then elsewhere): Foods, Not Specific Nutrients, May Be Key To Good Health.

In a recent academic review, a University of Minnesota professor in the School of Public Health has concluded that food as a whole, as opposed to specific nutrients, may be key to having a healthy diet.

As Americans, we’ve become focused on reductionist nutrition. By that, I mean that we say “Oh look! We measured these 3 phytonutrients in grapes and they are beneficial at x. I’ll just take a pill with these phytonutrients and bypass eating the grapes.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The first catch is that we can only put into pills what we have measured. To think that we’ve discovered every vitamin, mineral, and nutrient in every food available is ridiculous and naive. So when you eat an orange (or other citrus fruit), you aren’t getting just vitamins A, B, and C and a few other things that we know of. You’re probably also getting vitamins x1, x2, and x3 that are undiscovered, along with some other chemical compound that has beneficial effects in people that actually eat the orange. And there are unknown synergies between these elements when they occur within the same food, synergies that can never be duplicated in a lab.

The second catch is that most of the supplements on the shelf are made with synthetic vitamins and minerals, not the real deal isolated from food. I do take a multi-vitamin most days, but it’s a whole foods-based multi so the nutrients are from food, not a lab. I also don’t rely on the multi-vitamin to be my sole source of vitamins. I eat a nutrient-dense whole foods-based diet and use the multi as a backup plan to counter any nutrient deficiencies in the soil. All of the vitamin supplements in the world aren’t going to counter a diet of Krispy Kreme and Coca-Cola.

“We are confusing ourselves and the public by talking so much about nutrients when we should be talking about foods,” said David Jacobs, Ph.D., the principal investigator and Mayo Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. “Consumers get the idea that diet and health can be understood in terms of isolated nutrients. It’s not the best approach, and it might be wrong.”

The current media darling is omega-3 fatty acids, necessities in the diet to be sure. This is another nutrient that I supplement with by taking fish oil and cod liver oil. But I also eat grass-fed meats and plenty of fish, which are food sources of omega-3s. The sad part is when companies start adding omega-3s to food products to make them seem more appealing or advertise their product as a good source of omega-3 when it’s really not. Notice that the Quaker oats provide only 130mg of ALA, a paltry amount of an acid that is inefficiently converted to the EPA and DHA used by humans. But the average consumer doesn’t know that. They only know that the media says “eat more omega-3s,” so they gladly chow down on Quaker Oatmeal topped with flaxseeds.

Dr. Jacobs is right that we should be talking about food. The public needs to be educated on eating a nutrient-dense diet of meat, vegetables, nuts, fruit, and other natural foods rather than bread, pasta, “healthy whole grains,” and other foods that require processing. If people focused on getting their nutrients from food, they could take a simple multi-vitamin now and again and a bit of fish oil since most people aren’t eating enough fish or grass-fed meat. Humans evolved eating food, not nutrients. I promise that honoring that evolution by eating real foods will get most people 95% of the way to proper health. Eating man-made foods and relying on vitamin supplements to cover your tracks is a recipe for poor health.


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