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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.
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Why Is Nutrivore Important?
Nutrivore is simply the goal of getting all the nutrients our bodies need from the foods we eat! This includes obtaining sufficient macronutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, and protein and micronutrients such as vitamins like vitamin C and folate, and minerals like calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium. This approach doesn’t require us to feel deprived, doesn’t require weighing, measuring, or tracking food, and focuses on foods that are accessible and affordable, with the flexibility to apply the Nutrivore philosophy to however you currently eat. For instance, if you have a diet that you resonate with and love, whether it’s paleo, low-carb, vegan, or other, Nutrivore can be thought of as a diet modifier—an emphasis to overlay on top of your preferred diet’s structure, but you can also use Nutrivore principles as an anti-diet.
So, why is Nutrivore as a dietary concept important? Nutrivore is a dietary philosophy, not a diet itself, with a simple and irrefutably logical goal: we want to choose foods such that all of the nutrients those foods contain add up throughout the day to meet or safely exceed our body’s nutritional needs while staying within our energy requirements. The reason why this is important is that despite dietary guidelines, nearly everyone is falling short of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for essential vitamins and minerals and other really important nutrients like fiber.
Now, we’re not falling short of these nutrients in large amounts such that it causes a disease of malnutrition, like scurvy or rickets. But the reason why we worry about what’s called dietary insufficiency—which refers to that amorphous gray area between intake being so low that it causes a disease of deficiency and actually supplying our human body with what it wants—is that it increases the risk of just about everything that can go wrong with us health-wise. In scientific studies, nutrient insufficiencies are increasingly showing up as a major underlying driver of chronic disease, such as increasing risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, chronic kidney disease, asthma, allergies, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune disease, gout, and infection. It’s not a direct cause, like a disease of nutrient deficiency. Instead, it’s a contributor that interacts with things like genetics and lifestyle factors, health-related behaviors like whether or not we smoke or drink, altogether increasing risk. While diet plus lifestyle only account for 40 to 50% of health outcomes, that’s still a worthwhile fraction, and it makes upping our nutrient intake as part of a healthy diet a clear point of intervention.
The challenge is that most of the messaging from diet culture actually works against the goal of getting all the nutrients your body needs from the food you eat. So, Nutrivore is not just a dietary philosophy but the broad knowledge base to help us achieve it by focusing on the nutritional value of foods and helping us identify nutrient-dense foods!
How Is Nutrivore Different?
Nutrivore exists in between a diet and an anti-diet. How is it different? It has a permissive dietary structure rather than a restrictive one. With Nutrivore, there are no foods you have to cut. There are no “good” or “bad” types of foods, and instead emphasis is placed on the overall quality of the whole diet. The goal is sustainable nutrition, increasing diet quality in a way that can be maintained for the rest of your life. In order to improve your health over the long term and reduce the risk of chronic health problems in the future, it’s essential for higher quality nutrition to be a consistent feature of your life – enter the Nutrivore approach!
Nutrivore is a dietary philosophy that draws on nutritional sciences to inform our day-to-day choices—understanding nutrient density of foods and their effects on our bodies. By doing so, Nutrivore supports a healthy relationship with food, putting an end to restrictive dieting leading to disordered eating. It considers the psychology of dieting, particularly avoiding the negative psychological consequences of restrictive dieting, such as food fixation, obsession, cravings, and the risk of developing disordered eating patterns or eating disorders.
A key feature of Nutrivore is that no food is off the table unless you have medical, religious, or ideological reasons for avoiding it. So, how do you improve diet quality while still consuming ultra-processed foods or having dessert every day? It’s actually pretty easy to meet our nutritional needs from the foods we eat while staying within our caloric requirements when most of our food choices are centered around supplying our bodies with the nutrients we need. By choosing a wide variety of whole foods, we can include foods that are nutritionally distinct and offer something important that we can’t easily get from other foods. The Nutrivore Score is a tool objectively assessing the nutrients per calorie found within a food.
This doesn’t mean that nutrition-centered food choices need to feel hard. We can still prepare those foods in ways that are delicious to us. However, it’s important to distinguish them from foods we choose purely for joy, comfort, or cultural traditions. When we’re intentional about incorporating “quality of life foods,” we don’t feel deprived. Suddenly, all those nutrition-focused choices don’t require as much energy or dedication. While the primary goal of Nutrivore is to get all the nutrients our bodies need from the foods we eat, it is equally important to do so in a way that gets us off the diet roller coaster.
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Key Eating Patterns for Lifelong Health
The overall goal of Nutrivore is to get all the nutrients our bodies need from the food we eat. One way to do that is to focus on broad eating patterns known to increase diet quality and nutrient intake, in such a way that we don’t need to track, measure, or overthink our food choices. This is possible as long as long as we’re following the following three overall healthy eating patterns for lifelong health.
1. Choose Mostly Whole Foods
We’re going to use the loosest possible definition of whole foods: a food in which most of the inherent nutrition remains intact through processing. Generally, if at least 80% of our calories come from whole foods, even using this looser definition, it’s pretty easy to meet our nutritional requirements. Yes, this means that 20% of calories can come from anything else, even ultra-processed foods – these are considered quality of life foods. They’re the foods included in our diet to ensure we get enough joy from the foods we eat, so we don’t feel deprived and can maintain this way of eating forever.
2. Eat a Wide Diversity of Foods
Although there aren’t great studies narrowing in on an exact target, a case can be made for aiming for a dozen different foods per day and 35 or more different foods per week. To clarify, this refers to different whole food ingredients. A wide variety of studies show that dietary diversity is very important for overall health – this includes both plant foods and animal foods across food groups. The reason is that eating a wide variety of foods typically means we’re getting a wide variety of nutrients, maybe even all of them. In fact, studies have shown that dietary diversity scores can be used as a proxy for diet quality: low scores equal malnourishment, and high scores equal a high-quality diet.
3. Eat Plenty of Fruits and Vegetables
When it comes to how much fruit and veggies to include in our diets, science provides a range. The preponderance of evidence suggests aiming for five or more servings of culinary vegetables per day, which means “veggies” like tomatoes and squash count, and two or three servings of fruit per day. However, if that feels overwhelming, know that there is strong science for aiming for five total per day (two fruits and three vegetables), so that might be a good place to start and a goal to work up to. Second, every little bit counts. Eating vegetables in abundance lowers risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic kidney disease, osteoporosis and bone fragility fractures (including hip fracture), cognitive impairment and dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease), neurodegenerative diseases, asthma, allergies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, depression, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory polyarthritis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, acne, seborrheic dermatitis, and lowers markers of inflammation. Every bit of progress you make towards hitting targets for fruit and vegetable consumption does improve health! Every step we take will deliver health returns, so progress > perfection.
Bottom line, if you focus on establishing these three eating patterns as wellness habits to move through life with, you’ll have a high-quality diet that covers most of your nutritional bases.
Everything You Need to Jump into Nutrivore TODAY!
Nutrivore Quickstart Guide
The Nutrivore Quickstart Guide e-book explains why and how to eat a Nutrivore diet, introduces the Nutrivore Score, gives a comprehensive tour of the full range of essential and important nutrients!
Plus, you’ll find the Top 100 Nutrivore Score Foods, analysis of food groups, practical tips to increase the nutrient density of your diet, and look-up tables for the Nutrivore Score of over 700 foods.
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cITATIONS
Expand to see all scientific references for this article.
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Why Are Nutrients Important?
