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The concept of Nutrivore is very simple: Choose foods such that the total of all the nutrients contained within those foods adds up to meet or exceed our daily requirements for the full complement of essential and nonessential (but still very important) nutrients, while also staying within our caloric requirements. The easiest way to do this is to have the foundation of the diet be a wide variety of nutrient-dense whole and minimally-processed foods including selections from all of the nutritionally distinct food families.
Easy First Steps
What are some easy first steps to take to start increasing nutrient intake from the foods we eat, rather than relying on ineffective supplements? It depends on where you are at currently, but every step helps (remember progress is greater than perfection). For instance, adding a side-salad to your drive through order, choosing fruit as a snack, swapping sugary beverages with water, unsweetened tea, or juice, adding a handful of veggies to your dinner, or a few times a week swapping the protein you are eating with fish. All of these will improve health outcomes and you don’t have to do it all at once! Focus on making sustainable changes – those that are easy, affordable, convenient, and tasty. Experiment with trying new recipes in order to find ways of making these foods in an enjoyable way for you. Once you’ve got the basics down, then you can focus on taking further steps such as using the Nutivore weekly serving matrix to identify specific serving targets for foundational health-promoting foods to ensure you are covering all of the important food groups your body needs. Remember, you don’t need to eat “perfectly” to benefit. All of the small, better choices add up – you’re allowed to improve diet quality on your time-line!
In fact, a 2022 study estimated that adopting a healthier diet starting at age 20—defined as eating more vegetables, fruits, legumes (ex. beans, lentils), fish, and whole grains, as well as a handful of nuts each day, while reducing ultra-processed foods—could add nearly 11 years to the lifespan of females and 13 years to the lifespan of males!
And don’t worry if you aren’t 20 years old, because it’s never too late to benefit from improving diet quality. The same study showed that making these healthy diet changes at age 60 could still add 8 additional years of life and making these changes at age 80 could add 3.4 years of life!
Bottom line – eating vegetables and fruit in abundance results in numerous health benefits including a lower risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, as well as improvements in blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, and our immune system to name a few. And most importantly, every little bit counts!
Prepare Healthy Foods in Ways You Enjoy
Preparing healthy foods in a way that you enjoy them makes healthy choices sustainable! Studies show that when you like healthy foods you will choose them more often and eat more of them. (No surprise there!) For instance, a 2019 study looked at how emphasizing the tastiness of vegetable dishes versus the health benefits in college cafeterias showed that, sure enough, expecting a positive taste experience increased how much vegetables students served themselves, but it also increased how much they ate! What does this mean? We eat more veggies when they are prepared in ways that we enjoy!
So, go ahead and add salad dressings, dried fruit, nuts and cheese to salads, to make them more enjoyable. In no way does that take away from the health benefits you’re getting from the leafy greens in the salad. Sometimes it even helps with nutrient absorption. For instance including salad dressings with healthy fats such as olive oil help in the absorption of carotenoids and fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K! Adding a flavor you like to veggies you’re unenthusiastic about so that you enjoy them is a great trade every time. One of the worst messages we have learned from diet culture is that it doesn’t count if you are enjoying the foods you’re eating. That is just utter nonsense – preparing healthy foods in a way that you enjoy in no way takes away from the health benefits of those foods!
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Tips for Eating More Veggies!
The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates we maximize the health benefits from vegetables with about 5 servings per day, where one serving of most vegetables is 1 cup, chopped measured raw, and 2 cups for leafy greens, keeping in mind when cooked the majority of vegetables will shrink down to about half of a cup. If 5 servings of vegetables a day feels overwhelming to you, you’re not alone! On average, Americans are only consuming a mere 1.64 cup equivalents of vegetables each day!
Let’s work on improving that statistic by thinking of ways to help make incorporating more veggies into your diet easier. First of all, it helps to think about spreading your servings of veggies throughout your day, so that the amount of vegetables you’re eating at any one time isn’t overwhelming or unmanageable. For instance, breakfast is not a meal many would associate with veggies, but they can be incorporated in this first meal of the day in a variety of egg dishes such as omelets, frittatas, quiche, breakfast hash and scrambles. Root veggies mixed in with oatmeal can be delicious (ex. canned pumpkin, pureed carrots, winter squash, and sweet potato), smoothies are a popular choice, and leftover soup may not be the norm but is also a great way to start your day! Ways to add veggies to lunch include veggie sticks with your favorite dip, adding leafy greens to your sandwich of choice, and of course soups and salads. If you’re snacking throughout the day, again veggies and dip are a great choice, but these days there are also many pre-packaged options available such as kale chips, individual packages of pickles, or why not bake some muffins or other baked good that incorporate vegetables? Dinner is likely the easiest meal to include veggies. Options include steamed or roasted veggies as a side dish, or a side salad but also think of easy ways to add vegetables to meals that don’t already have a lot of them such as adding veggies to your pasta sauce or swapping out noodles with veggie noodles (ex. zucchini, hearts of palm, spaghetti squash etc), or serve tacos with salsa, shredded lettuce, and avocado. There are also many dishes naturally loaded with veggies such as stir-fries, stews, or casseroles. Most of all, make sure to prepare your veggies in ways that you enjoy them – if you like how they taste, you will end up eating more of them!
Easy Prep Affordable Vegetables
If you’re on-board with including more vegetables in your diet but find it too time-consuming to include them in your meals, again you’re not alone. Let’s look at some ways to reduce the effort required to up your vegetable intake. What are some veggies that don’t require much or any prep before cooking? My top recommendation is frozen veg! Frozen veggies and fruit are great options! Not only are they picked at peak ripeness, which maximizes nutrient density, but they’re frozen quickly which helps to preserve all their valuable vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants even after prolonged storage in the freezer. Even better – they are pre-washed, trimmed, and ready-to-go which is a huge time saver. They can be cooked directly from frozen, plus you only use what you need so there is less food waste. They are almost always cheaper than fresh, and they often go on sale. Let’s just say win-win-win!
Another option available in most grocery stores in the produce section is pre-washed, pre-trimmed, pre-prepared vegetables such as bags of broccoli florets, trimmed Brussels sprouts, peeled and cubed butternut squash, trimmed green beans, bagged leafy greens like spinach, kale, and collards, veggie mixes or slaws, and ready-to-go raw vegetables for veggie trays. The trade-off is cost. In essence you are trading your time for money which means per pound these veggies will typically cost more but for some the extra cost is worth it. There are also some veggies which require minimal prep that may be more affordable such as cherry tomatoes, bagged spinach, baby carrots, washed, sliced mushrooms, and green beans and snow peas which don’t have to be trimmed prior to cooking. Plus, don’t forget canned vegetables which are also convenient, affordable, and require little effort. And, despite what you may have heard, canned produce is safe to consume as our bodies efficiently eliminate BPA and the average human exposure to BPA is much less than levels of concern. Hopefully some of these suggestions will work for you!
Easily track your servings of Nutrivore Foundational Foods!
The Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix
The Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix digital resource is an easy-to-use and flexible weekly checklist designed to help you maximize nutrient-density and meet serving suggestions of Nutrivore foundational foods, all without having to weigh or measure your foods!
Includes a 22-page instructional guide and downloadable interactive guides.
Buy now for instant digital access.
Tips for Eating More Fruit!
Most studies show that 2 or 3 servings for fruit per day is the “sweet” spot when it comes to health benefits, where one serving is 1 cup, chopped measured raw for most fruits and ¼ cup for fatty fruits such as olives, avocado, and coconut. Many people find it easier to meet serving recommendations for fruit but this may not be the case for everyone. Strategies for incorporating more fruit into your diet include serving fruit as a side dish with meals including lunch and dinner, either to eat at the end of the meal for dessert or alongside everything else on your plate. Fruit can be eaten on its own or incorporated into other dishes such as side salads, fruit salsas and chutneys. Fruit makes for a great snack and is easily portable for packed lunches (think apples and bananas!) At breakfast, fruit is often incorporated directly into dishes such as in smoothies or added into a bowl of oatmeal or yogurt. Jam is another popular option which counts, but remember that it tends to have a fair amount of added sugar and we want to make sure to keep added sugar to no more than 10% of our total calories. Dried, canned, and frozen fruit are other convenient options that count as well and allow us to have access to our favorite fruits even when they’re not in season! Just be careful of fruits canned in syrup since the added sugar contributes calories but not much nutrition. Lastly, while not as good as whole food, juice also counts, optimally limited to one 5-oz glass per day, which is equivalent to those 2 to 3 servings of fruit. Finally, leaving washed fruit on the counter encourages snacking on it, especially with kids who will find it hard to resist!
cITATIONS
Expand to see all scientific references for this article.
Fadnes LT, Økland JM, Haaland ØA, Johansson KA. Estimating impact of food choices on life expectancy: A modeling study. PLoS Med. 2022 Feb 8;19(2):e1003889. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003889. Erratum in: PLoS Med. 2022 Mar 25;19(3):e1003962. PMID: 35134067; PMCID: PMC8824353.
Turnwald BP, Bertoldo JD, Perry MA, Policastro P, Timmons M, Bosso C, Connors P, Valgenti RT, Pine L, Challamel G, Gardner CD, Crum AJ. Increasing Vegetable Intake by Emphasizing Tasty and Enjoyable Attributes: A Randomized Controlled Multisite Intervention for Taste-Focused Labeling. Psychol Sci. 2019 Nov;30(11):1603-1615. doi: 10.1177/0956797619872191. Epub 2019 Oct 2. PMID: 31577177; PMCID: PMC6843749.
Which Mushroom Is Most Nutrient-Dense?
