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The China Study Finding Number One

Don?t worry too much about single nutrients, single foods, or single supplements. Simply eat from the right food groups (Nutrient Rich Foods, like vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts and seeds?) and you will have a diet that is exceptionally rich in health-promoting factors.

A comparison between the nutrient contents of plant and animal-based foods shows how vital it is to choose the right food groups. The best part: by casting aside the barrage of details that we hear every single day (Are eggs good? Bad?) and choosing to eat from food groups that are rich in nutrients, we can enjoy excellent health without anxiety.

People concern themselves a great deal with the details about food and health. We wonder whether chicken is better than beef, whether olive oil is better than canola oil, and whether flax seed meal needs to be eaten every day or every other day. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to get these details right, except for the fact that worrying about these details often causes us to lose sight of the big picture: our overall dietary pattern week in and week out is the most important factor in determining our health. Our overall dietary pattern has to do with questions like, ?What do I eat more of: plants or animals?? Or, ?Am I eating voluminous amounts of food fragments (processed foods, like sugar and oil, cookies and potato chips that are merely extracts of Nutrient Rich Foods) and very few whole fruits and vegetables?? The answers to these questions are far more telling, and far more important, than the details we often worry about.

The reason these big, general questions are so important is that nutritional differences between food groups are far larger and more impressive than differences between single foods. The biggest differences are found between plant and animal foods. The following chart shows the nutrient differences between these two food groups.

500 calories ? 100 calories each of Egg, Turkey Breast, Whole Milk, Ground Beef and Pork ** 500 calories ? 100 calories each of Whole Wheat Flour, Red Pepper, Kale, Mango and Canned Garbanzo Beans

As you can see, there are major differences between the nutrients in these two food groups. Plant-based foods have no cholesterol and less fat, protein, vitamins B12 and D and zinc than animal-based foods, although zinc levels are quite comparable. On the other hand, plant-based foods exclusively have fiber and more of many other vitamins and minerals. These are important differences. Animal based foods have significant amounts of cholesterol and fat and protein ? far more than is healthy ? and compared to fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, they severely lack many of the vitamins and nutrients that have been found to be beneficial to health. It is a double-whammy, so to speak. You get the bad, and you also miss out on the good. Plant-based foods, on the other hand, are exceptionally rich in health-promoting nutrients like fiber and antioxidants, including vitamin C and b-carotene. Furthermore, with the exception of vitamin B12, there are virtually no essential nutrients that are needed that are not abundantly available in plants. In other words, there is no ?downside? to consuming plant-based foods.

You may notice that there are some apparent deficiencies in plants, but these ?deficiencies?, for the most part, are not problematic at all. Going down the list of possible deficiencies:

  • Cholesterol. We do not need to consume cholesterol. Our bodies make all that we need.
  • Protein. The protein levels that may appear to be low compared to the animal-based foods are more than enough for optimal health. In fact, the high levels of protein in animal-based foods may be harmful. For many decades, the government has recommended that roughly 10% of calories in your diet should come from protein. This is more than enough to meet the requirements for virtually all people. The plant-based foods shown above derive over 12% of their calories from protein, on average. Going much higher than this, especially if you are getting most of your protein from animal-based foods, has been linked to heart disease, various cancers, kidney stones, and gout and bone problems.
  • Vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient that can be found in plants if they are grown in a healthy organic soil rich with microorganisms. In addition, our evolutionary ancestors were likely to get B12 from eating plants that were not scoured of all dirt ? B12 is produced by microorganisms in healthy soils. Because we don?t eat plants grown in soil rich with B12 and we don?t consume much dirt anymore, supplements are necessary if no animal products are consumed. This is not a flaw in plant-based foods ? it is merely a symptom of our separation from nature.
  • Vitamin D. Finally, it is not essential to consume vitamin D because our skin produces this nutrient when it is exposed to the sun. Being in the sun for 15 minutes or so every couple days provides all the vitamin D our bodies need. If you are not outside for even this minimal amount of time, consuming a small vitamin D supplement or fortified food can correct any potential deficiencies.

This evidence shows that consuming a diet of predominantly plant-based foods produces a very different nutrient intake than consuming a diet of predominantly high-protein, high-fat, animal-based foods. These differences in nutrient patterns are so striking that the details surrounding different foods and single nutrients become an after-thought; a minor concern that becomes of little relevance, if at all, when our diets are highly skewed in favor of animal based foods. I could go through a similar explanation with foods that are heavily processed, like cookies, chips, fries, and sodas, versus Nutrient Rich Foods. Focusing on the differences between the classes of the foods you?re eating is far more valuable than comparing the individual foods in each class. For example plant foods, vary widely in their nutrient contents.

There is a second, even more important point that is often forgotten as we focus on nutrition details, supplements, and pills ad nauseam. Nutrition, health and disease relationships are the result of extraordinarily complex biochemical systems that we do not fully understand. There are thousands of chemicals in food that scientists do not know anything about, and thousands of reactions in the body that scientists have not begun to untangle. To worry about single chemicals acting within single reactions is short-sighted, and yet this is how most of the anxiety producing nutrition details surface in the popular media. The main lesson, the lesson that we too often forget, is that if you get the big picture right, if you have a health-promoting overall diet and lifestyle, you can relax and enjoy your food without worrying about minute details every day. Eat a plant-based diet rich in nutrients, stay physically active and your body will do the rest!