Spicing up your diet

[greenghost]

All right. So we all know that we are supposed to eat a bunch of fruits and veggies. However, I have been thinking a bit more about the health benefits of tea and the following thought occured to me: "What if I just ate the stuff?" And then I realized that, to some extent, we already do this: spices!

You may have read recently that there are very powerful antioxidants in both oregano and tumeric. Basically it is the same phenomenon as with tea. So I have started "super spicing" my food: rather than using a little oregano, I put a tablespoon or more in scrambled eggs. When I make tacos, I put in a big dose of tumeric (the taste is covered up by the cumin and red pepper). Extra garlic and ground flax seed in everything. [But don't put the spices in too early, cooking them too much ruins their health benefits.]

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. It is a bit like getting some extra salad without having to eat any salad. The fact of the matter is that the modern diet has a paucity of phytochemicals, and for the most part phytochemicals come from plants.

Yeah, yeah. Don't ruin the taste of your food. But if you plan it out, you can pack a lot of extra nutrients in your food without even noticing it.

[tuffshot]

I like pepper.. :)

The thing is the body will only use or except a certain amount of anything the other goes to waste. I know this to be the case with vitimins but should not vary with spices. And I am not sure when a level of certain minerals, vitimans or antioxidents become toxic instead of benificial.

I do know we do not get the proper amounts from the food we eat so suppliments are good but to what extent can be the question. More natural suppliments would probably be better than the fast growing miracle vitimins that are being pimped today though.

[greenghost]

Hey tuffshot,

You are right that the body will only use so much of any substance, the rest is either excreted or stored. But this papers over quite a bit of controversy. The question is: how much is too much? For some compounds (e.g., minerals and most fat soluble vitamins except vitamin E) the answer is easy because they become toxic at known levels. Even for these compounds, however, the RDAs are arguably inadequate. A good diet of fresh, nonprocessed foods will blow away the RDAs for most vitamins.

And really this is where the worry comes in. The modern diet, even for someone who is conscientious, is pretty nutrient poor. It can require a little bit of a perspective shift to recognize that your diet is probably less nutritious calorie for calorie than the typical diet of a hunter-gatherer. You take in more calories, but more of those calories are empty calories. And I don't just mean refined sugar. The naturally occurring analogues to most of the foods you find in your local grocery story are far more nutritious than commerically produced ones. Think about the difference between eating wild rasberries and store bought ones. Both have about the same micronutrient profile, but in the wild berry those nutrients are packed into a packet with considerably fewer overall calories. So for the amount of calories I get in one commerically produced raspberry, I can eat four or five wild ones and get two to three times the phytochemicals, micronutrients, and fiber. Or think about eating some canned tuna. Same amount of protein more or less as fresh caught, but only about 5% of the vitamin content. To put the point differently: commerically produced foods have a different macronutrient (carbs, fat, protein) to micronutrient (vitamins, phytochemicals) ratio than naturally occurring foods. In the case of fruits, we get more carbs (sugars) for the same micronutrient package. And raspberries are healthfood! Throw on top of that a small bag of chips or an 8 oz soda or a Snickers bar and you have such a whopping disparity that it would be almost impossible to make up the difference.

Now if you take that idea and extrapolate out to your diet as a whole, you will see why it is so hard to get amounts of micronutrients from a modern diet that are comparable to the amounts in a hunter-gatherer diet. But it is the hunter-gatherer diet that your genes are designed to handle; that is the baseline from which we should evaluating what your body needs. Just because eating the RDA for vitamin B12 allows you to avoid symptomatic vitamin deficiency, doesn't mean that you are aren't vitamin deficient. The established recommended values are based on a highly conservative blanket assessment of the population and are aimed at keeping people from vitamin deficiencies. The question of what is optimal, versus what is minimally adequate to avoid deficiencies, is not factored in. [And, of course, there aren't any RDAs for phytochemicals.]

At any rate, that is how I see things.

[tuffshot]

Marc,

I'll buy that.. :)
This diabetic thing has gotten me back to more of a natural way of eating. It is funny though how we go for convieniance in food preperation instead of healthy choices. I have preached this to my wife for years but convienance and the taste cravings of certain food wins alot of times. As potatoes became a staple food of choice for many they are loaded in starch and about the only real benifit is when they are baked but are really just a filler food.

As preservatives and other additives of processed foods are absorbed by the body they take away from any nutricional value the food itself. Knowing and practicing good eating habits is a hard thing to do in this modern day world.