Two interesting ideas for good nutrition

When striving for good nutrition, a majority of people focus on what not to eat. While limiting added sugars, refined grains, and highly-processed food will be helpful, this focus leaves many folks feeling stressed as they focus on abstinence.

An complimentary approach is to focus on "getting the good stuff in" rather than just "keeping the bad stuff out."

As a reminder, every healthy eating plan will focus on building your diet from some or all of the following:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Whole grains
• Lean protein sources
• Healthy fats

So how might we focus on getting "more of the good stuff" in?

What You Can Do:
I've come across two interesting ideas recently that I found interesting and perhaps worth considering:

1. Eat 800 g of produce each day (~27 ounces). If you're curious what that might look like, take a look at the photo above. This tactic came from the book Built to Move with the idea that doing so would provide significant fiber and micronutrients (think isoflavones, polyphenols, vitamins, etc.) that help the body to produce energy, heal itself, and generally function well. Eating more produce is also associated with greater satiety, and therefore ideally less of the 9 pm munchies.
    
2. Eat 30 different plants each week. In an interesting study, researchers found that those who reported eating more than 30 different types of plants per week - vegetables, fruits, spices, nuts, seeds - had a profile of gut bacteria that was more diverse, contained more bacteria associated with good health, and fewer antibiotic resistance genes. In a way, this provides reinforcement to "eat the rainbow" of colors in your diet.

Perhaps you'd like to challenge yourself to try one of these approaches for a week.

Going Deeper:

• Healthline.com "17 Creative Ways to Eat More Vegetables"
• Built to Move book by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett.
• American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

Have a great week,

Dr. Topher Fox

P.S. If you missed any previous emails, the content is posted weekly here

P.P.S. Below are the pictures from my exam room wall which we are exploring for this email series.