"What are the Healthiest Foods?"
The latest dietary guidelines – 2015 guidelines won't be out until
probably January 2016 – have a chapter on food components to reduce.
But when they say things like reduce intake of solid fats
(major sources of saturated and trans fatty acids),
what does that mean in terms of which foods to reduce?
Similarly, there's a chapter on nutrients we should increase our intake of,
so-called shortfall nutrients.
But when they say we need more magnesium, for example,
what does that mean in terms of actual food?
Let's look at 20 different types of foods to see,
based on the federal guideline criteria,
which foods are the healthiest, and which foods are the least healthy.
To illustrate, I'll use traffic light labeling, like the UK signpost system
which assigns colors for like green meaning go,
yellow or amber meaning caution,
and red meaning stop and think before you put it in your mouth.
Added sugars is easy.
Anyone could have guessed sweets and soda,
but there's often surprising levels even in savory snack foods,
like Ritz crackers, which I'm using as my snack example.
The top five offenders are basically
soda, doughnuts, Kool-Aid, ice cream, and candy.
Next is caloric density, calories per serving,
where oils join dessert and processed snack foods as the worst,
though one cannot consider eggs, fish, nuts and seeds, poultry,
other meat or soda to be low-calorie foods.
The top five sources of calories in the American diet
are basically desserts, bread, chicken, soda and pizza.
Can you guess where cholesterol is found?
Desserts, dairy, eggs, fish, chicken, and other meat.
#1 by far is eggs, but then chicken contributes more cholesterol
to the American diet than beef, then cheese and pork.
Here are the foods high in saturated fat,
coming from dairy, dairy, doughnuts, dairy, chicken.
Salt levels highest in lunch meat and snack foods,
but Americans get most of their sodium from bread, chicken and pizza.
About half of our food groups here have trans fats
either naturally or artificially added or created.
Cakes, cookies, crackers, pies and doughnuts number one,
then animal products, margarine, French fries, chips, and microwave popcorn.
Now to the nutrients.
Green is a high source, pale green is a medium source,
and white a poor source for calcium, fiber, magnesium, potassium,
vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K.
OK, I know that was a little fast. Let's put it all together.
OK, now this is nutrients per typically 100 grams,
about three and a half ounces,
but that's not how our body keeps track of what we eat.
The body's food currency is in calories, not grams.
Our body monitors how much energy we eat,
not how much weight we eat, weight of food.
We only have about 2,000 calories in the calorie bank to spend every day,
so to maximize our nutrient purchase,
we want to eat the most nutrient-dense foods.
So I just changed this from nutrients per weight to nutrients per calories.
The foods are just listed here in alphabetical order to look for trends
so we can kind of rank them based on these scores from best to worst.
So the foods to emphasize in one's diet are unprocessed, unrefined,
plant-based foods, which in general lack the disease-promoting components
and, as the Dietary Guidelines Committee put it,
these foods contain not only the essential vitamins and minerals,
but also hundreds of naturally occurring phytonutrients
that may protect against cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis,
and other chronic health conditions.
So this chart actually extends far to the right,
hundreds of additional bright green columns
capturing all the phytonutrients found in whole plant foods,
but largely missing from processed and animal derived foods.
There would just be hundreds more white columns
here in the middle with a few green tiles far off at the end.
And the lack of disease- preventing compounds
may be compounded by the presence of disease-promoting compounds.
So that's why people eating more plant-based
tend to end up eating a more nutrient-dense dietary pattern,
closer to the current federal dietary guidelines.
And the more plant-based we get, apparently, the better.