The color of health: add these hues to your diet and live longer and stronger - Active Nutrition

Men's Fitness, May, 2002 by Ben Kallen

Dining at a steakhouse with a fellow doctor, David Heber eyed his colleague's plate dubiously. "His meal consisted of iceberg lettuce with thousand-island dressing, meat and potatoes," recalls Heber, founding director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles. "A typical beige diet."

Okay, so what should the poor guy have eaten? "It's simple, really," says Heber, an M.D. and a Ph.D. and the author of What Color Is Your Diet? "For the same number of calories, he could have started with a leafy green salad with lots of colorful vegetables and raspberry vinegar, had some chicken breast or fish, steamed veggies on the side, and for dessert some mixed fruit with chocolate syrup drizzled on top." The difference is easy to see, Heber says: It's all in the color.

LIVING COLORS

More and more, nutrition experts are declaring that having a multitude of colors on your plate is the key to healthful eating, and not merely because colorful fruits and vegetables are brimming with healthful fiber, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. What most people don't realize is that the red, yellow, orange, and blue tints themselves have healthful properties.

"Plants synthesize a vast array of chemical compounds that aren't involved in their primary metabolism," says James A. Joseph, Ph.D., chief of the neuroscience lab at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tuffs University in Boston. "These are mainly related to the plant's survivability against such things as sunlight, disease, soil problems and extreme temperatures. And since we have some of the same problems that plants have, the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects these chemicals bring are important for us, too."

For instance, while sunshine is necessary for a plant to grow, it can also create oxidative stress. So phytochemicals can provide a form of sunscreen, absorbing certain colors of light as they give the plants a particular hue. When we take in those antioxidant chemicals, they help mitigate sun damage in us as well.

Damage caused when oxygen metabolizes can lead to a variety of problems in your body, from cancer the effects of aging. "We don't have studies on longevity and humans, but the evidence in animals shows that antioxidants extend life span," Heber notes. "And for those people working to keep fit, they're very useful for muscle recovery as well."

Unfortunately, the modern world's colorless diet of meat, potatoes and highly processed foods means that a significant number of folks miss out on the variety of substances that could be helping them stay youthful, healthy and fit. "Today's dietary problems are an accident of nature," Heber explains. "We evolved on a plant-based diet, but our diets have changed tremendously just over the past 100 years. On one hand, we're eating more unhealthy foods in large amounts just because we can. On the other, there's a much wider variety of fruits and vegetables available to us today, if only we took advantage of it."

HOW TO START

To change your diet from empty off-white to intensely colored, you can begin with some simple substitutions: * yellow corn instead of white * sweet potatoes (or the purple potatoes now available in some supermarkets) instead of russetts * pink grapefruit instead of white * romaine lettuce instead of iceberg * cabernet instead of chardonnay * Guinness instead of Bud. And eat foods that have had the least amount of processing: * whole grains instead of refined flour * brown rice instead of white * baked potatoes with the skin intact instead of fries * real fruit instead of Skittles.

It doesn't really matter if you get something from every color group each day; just eat as wide a variety of foods as possible and try to get the recommended five to nine daily servings of produce. Of course, the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the more of these crucial compounds you'll absorb. While there's no way to know the phytochemical content of a given piece of produce, choose items that have the deepest color and seem both fresh and ripe (or flash-frozen, which can be equally nutritious).

"If you know nothing else, you can put together a good diet with color alone," Heber says. "It isn't a magic bullet, but if you want to maximize the antioxidants in your food, this is a good way to start."

REALTED ARTICLE: A quick guide to colorful foods.

Color: Red

Foods: Tomatoes (especially cooked-tomato products such as canned tomatoes, pasta sauce, tomato juice, tomato paste), red onions, pink grapefruit, watermelon

Benefits: Antioxidant lycopene protects against prostate and other cancers.

Color: Red/purple

Foods: Red grapes and juice, fresh or frozen berries, cherries, apples and plums, raisins, prunes, red peppers, purple cabbage, eggplant

Benefits: Anthocyanins appear highly protective against oxidative damage and heart disease. Ellagic acid prevents carcinogens from binding to DNA. Resveratrol in grapes and wine help blood vessels maintain elasticity.

Color: Orange