Does Food Actually Nourish You Anymore?

by: Manny Aragon

Recently an article was published in the NY Times entitled Breeding The Nutrition Out Of Our Food .It caused many folks in the nutrition community to blink not because it goes against anything we have been saying in the recent past, rather, because it further validates the common refrain coming from my lips “ eating whole foods and a balanced diet isn’t enough anymore”.

There are myraid reasons why this is the case, the most prominent among them  that depleted soils from generations of agriculture on the same soil cannot possibly give the plants all the nutrients they need to properly thrive (not to mention that the vast majority of folks are NOT eating the wide compliment of whole foods required for their nutritional needs even if the foods had their full nutritional content (they don’t)…Not even close).

On top of that is the revelation printed in the article that the varietals of vegetables and fruits that are grown (organic AND conventional) have had the phytonutrient content basically bred out of them in favor of flavor. This basically means that over thousands of years of agriculture, we have selected the sweetest and least bitter and weakest flavored fruits and vegetables and planted only the seeds from those plants rather than from the whole crop (variation in flavors and all). Over the eons, as we have selected the sweetest and most pleasant tasting offspring , we have in advertently bred out the very stuff that makes these fruits and veggies healthy to us in the first place.

So, at this point, it is still important to eat a wide variety of vegetables of various colors (avoiding the night shade family), organic preferred, heritage varietals preferred, to get as much of the phytonutrient compliment as you can possibly get. It is also important to recognize that the very forces that allowed us to become civilized, have also made it impossible to get all of the nutrients that our bodies need for disease free living from the fruits and veggies (and animal proteins) that we eat.

In light of this, I’d like to point out that there still is a way to get all of your necessary phyto-nutrients. This involves proper, individually tailored, supplementation using whole food concentrates and herbs. Nutritional deficiencies can be as subtle as a once in a while general discomfort or general lack of energy, or as extreme as full blown diseases like congestive heart failure, atherosclerosis, and high blood pressure (if let run their course). This doesn’t have to be the case and many of these problems are fairly straight forward to resolve- given time and the right dietary and lifestyle changes.