Fruits And Vegetables, Are These Really Weight Loss Foods?
Fruits and Vegetables are NOT created equal.
So Color your Diet!
Weight loss food is an issue everyone must understand if they desire to be healthy.
There are an incredible number of Books and Articles available to those
Dieters seeking the perfect answer to their weight loss food questions.
Unfortunately, the number of ‘Perfect Answers’ is almost as numerous as the quantities of Books and Articles available on food.
We will start our search for your ‘Perfect’ weight loss food with an Article from Natural Bodybuilder Expert Tom Venuto titled ‘What Color is Your Diet’.
Remember, finding your perfect weight loss diet begins with an understanding of what food does for your body.
Weight Loss Foods Tips, Tricks & Techniques
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- There are hundreds of different types of fruits and vegetables.
- Everything you need can be found in your food.
- Food truly is the most powerful drug.
- Think about your nutrition in terms of a wide variety of natural foods, that includes a wide variety of colors.
- The natural way is the best.
- Our bodies are their self-regulating natural pharmacies.
- Be prudent in this modern industrial age to take a multivitamin/mineral supplement and maybe an essential fatty acid supplement.
Weight Loss Foods, What Color Is Your Diet
By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT
QUESTION: Dear Tom: I’ve seen quite a few diet books lately that are based on the color of the foods you eat, including the rainbow diet, the color diet, and the “color code” (sounds like the Da Vinci code, LOL!)
Anyway, I’ve been reading your newsletters for a long time and I know how you feel about diet pills, books, and gimmicks I was wondering what you thought about these programs.
Is it just another gimmick?
ANSWER: Based on the clever titles, it might be tempting to dismiss these programs as gimmicks, and in fact when your weekly menus are literally “color-coded,” it might seem that the diet book authors are just scrambling for a new hook or premise on which to base an entire eating program.
I have not read any of those books you mentioned yet, so I can’t comment on any of them specifically.
However, as “gimmicky” as eating from every color in the rainbow may sound at first, there is some very legitimate and scientific evidence that this is a great idea.
We are often advised to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (which have a variety of different colors).
Good advice of course; even common sense would tell us that.
However, “eat a lot of fruits and vegetables” is vague advice because it could mean eating only apples and broccoli (red and green), and nothing else, but eating “a lot” of them.
To take that advice to the next level, a better recommendation would be to eat a WIDE VARIETY of fruits and vegetables (not just “a lot”).
Even “wide variety” is not defined. What is a wide variety?
Did you know that there are hundreds of different types of fruits and veggies?
To make an even greater distinction, you could begin to sort your fruits and vegetables by color and eat a wide variety every day (at least 5 to 9 servings) and an even wider variety spread over each week.
Why would you go to all the trouble?
Well, each food color is indicative of the phytonutrients and other healthful nutritional compounds found within these foods.
According to the textbook Sports & Exercise Nutrition by Katch, Katch & McArdle), over 4000 phytochemicals have been identified, and 150 of them have been studied in detail.
By definition, phytonutrients (also called phytochemicals) are naturally occurring, health-promoting compounds found in the plant kingdom.
There has been much research on the functional properties of these compounds, proving that they play important and diverse roles in maintaining your health and protecting you from disease.
Foods such as tomatoes (red), carrots (orange), broccoli (green), and blueberries (blue) all contain important phytochemicals that play specific roles in health and disease prevention.
Onions, whole grains, herbs, spices, and other foods also contain their special types of protective phytochemicals.
Here are some of the phytochemicals and naturally health-promoting compounds and the foods they correspond to:
- FLAVONOIDS (quercitin, kaempferol, myricetin, catechins)
- Fruits
- Vegetables
- Berries
- Citrus fruits
- Onions
- Purple grapes
- Tea
- CAROTENOIDS (lutein, lycopene, zeaxanthin, a-carotene, b-carotene)
- Carrots
- Tomatoes
- Cantaloupe Apricots
- GLUCOSINOLATES (glucobrassicin, isothiocyanates, indoles)
- Cruciferous vegetables
- Broccoli
- Brussel sprouts
- Cabbage
- SULFIDES (allium compounds, dithiolthiones)
- Onions
- Garlic
- Leeks
- scallions
Each of these compounds has a health-promoting role in the body ranging from antioxidant activity to cancer protection.
There is much more going on here than just building muscle and shedding body fat.
Eating a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and other natural foods has major health and quality of life implications.
It’s great news to know how much control we can take over our health and physical fitness simply with proper food choices (and proper exercise).
The only thing about these discoveries that saddens and disappoints me is that it seems each time our scientists discover something, such as lycopene in tomatoes for example, someone wants to put it in a bottle and sell it to us. (Why not just go to the source and eat the tomatoes???)
I believe in an intelligent creator, and I believe that the creator of our bodies and this universe we live in knew exactly what he was doing when he created the marvelous diversity of plants and animals that comprise our food supply.
Although it may be prudent in this modern industrial age to take a multivitamin/mineral supplement and maybe an essential fatty acid supplement for “nutritional insurance,” everything you need can be found in your food.
If you think about what the discovery of all these naturally occurring compounds means, you will have to agree that food truly is the most powerful drug.
Combine that with recent discoveries in physiology and psychoneuroimmunology proving that our bodies are their self-regulating natural pharmacies, and you also have to agree that the natural way is the best.
In any case, it’s not enough to think only in terms of calories and macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats).
Energy needs and macronutrient needs are important but also think about your nutrition in terms of a wide variety of natural foods, that include a wide variety of colors.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, ‘Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.’ Tom has written more than 200 articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men, and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide.