Join Dr. Sarah on her Science Strolls and learn more about the Nutrivore Philosophy!
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.
With all the hoopla these days, it’s hard to know what is currently considered “healthy eating”. Sometimes fresh fruit is labelled as a healthy food, sometimes it’s called “nature’s candy” and is demonized. It seems impossible to figure out what types of food we should and shouldn’t be including in our diets! Should we be 100% avoiding all “standard American foods” including breakfast cereals, carbs, energy drinks, fast food, french fries, fried foods, fruit juice, hot dogs, ice cream, potato chips, red meat, snack foods, soft drinks, sports drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fats, white bread, white rice, and all ultra-processed or highly processed foods, or is it portion size that matters? Is the goal that every meal is low-fat, and full of brown rice, healthy fats, lean meats, legumes, lentils, quinoa, sweet potatoes, and whole grains? Are avocados and olive oil bad or good? What dietary guidelines should we be following in order to be in good health and limit poor health conditions and chronic disease? What even is considered good health – is it based on weight loss or the elimination of health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and risk of heart disease, or does our health come down to lifestyle factors such as adequate sleep and physical activity or is it a combination of all of it?
As confusing as it all seems, the Nutrivore philosophy aims to simplify the noise and boil every thing down to a simple concept: choose foods to meet the body’s nutritional needs. With this goal in mind, not every food you eat has to be the most nutrient-dense food—your diet can meet your nutritional needs while including some low nutrient-density, quality-of-life foods!
Are There Foods We Shouldn’t Eat?
There are no bad foods! All foods can fit into a healthy diet. What makes the diet healthy or not healthy is not the presence or absence of any particular food. Instead, it’s the relative proportions of different foods and whether or not your nutritional needs are met by your overall diet.
There are 3 really important eating patterns for long-term health.
· Eat mostly whole and minimally processed foods. Ideally no more than 20% of calories from ultra-processed foods.
· Eat a lot more plant foods than animal foods by volume. Ideally ¾ of every plate is plant foods.
· Eat a varied diet, having as many different whole foods and whole-food based ingredients represented in the diet as possible.
The Nutrivore philosophy appreciates the inherent nutritional value of foods, without labelling any food as good or bad. By extension, no singular food choice is a bad one, and Nutrivore fully embraces treats, cultural foods, and food traditions, without derision.
It’s important to highlight all the awesome foods that fit within this eating pattern and to celebrate all of the amazing foods we already enjoy and eat regularly, including the ones you didn’t know were so good for you. That’s why my content highlights the nutritive value of common foods and show you the value of foods you already like, have access to, and can afford.
Any Food Can Fit Into a Healthy Diet!
The biggest mindset change for me in building Nutrivore was the realization that any food can fit into a healthy diet, especially when coming from a world of very restrictive dieting, where the belief is what makes you healthier is cutting out “food toxins.”
If you meet your body’s nutritional needs from the foods you eat, does it matter if one of those foods didn’t contribute a lot of nutrients? Does it matter if one of those foods was for joy instead of nutrition? The answer is no! That in no way takes away from all of the nutrients you got from everything else you ate. In fact, if you’re focusing on really nutrient-dense foods, you can meet your nutritional needs with just a fraction of your caloric requirements so you have a lot of room for quality of life foods.
Not every food you eat needs to be the pinnacle of nutrient density—your diet can meet your nutritional needs while including some low nutrient-density, quality-of-life foods. Furthermore, there is no one perfect Nutrivore diet—there is a ton of flexibility of food choice that aligns with Nutrivore principles. And, Nutrivore celebrates every small step you take towards consuming a more nutrient-replete diet.
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- Easy Steps to Nutrivore 4-page guide
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- Nutrivore Meal Map
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3 Foods You Should Never Eat?
Even though I consistently share the message that there are no bad foods on Nutrivore and that all foods can fit into a healthy diet, there are some exceptions. So, what are the 3 foods you should never eat? Foods you are allergic to, foods you really don’t like, and foods that are outside of your budget!
Fear mongering about food is out of control but I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to be afraid of food! The various rationale put forth by diet gurus for cutting out whole foods, and sometimes entire food groups based on food toxins, just don’t hold water. Even though these arguments may have really logical sounding explanations and may even have data from scientific studies to support them, the problem is they focus on how one isolated food compound may be harmful in one biological system in one specific circumstance. A perfect example is the notion that we should be avoiding eating tomatoes because their solanine is inflammatory in animal and cell culture models of colitis. From this piece of information, the message is generalized to every health situation, further generalized to the whole food and not just that one compound, and sometimes generalized to every food that has a similar compound, but that’s not how our biology works! You have to look at the whole food and how it impacts the whole body, not to say that some people won’t have food intolerances, sensitivities, and allergies which can be driven by a single compound. We also have to take into consideration the concept of dose. Just because something is harmful in large quantities and when isolated, doesn’t mean it is harmful in the quantities we get from food. Re-visiting the tomato example, tomato and tomato products have been shown to have a neutral impact or reduce markers of inflammation. In fact, a 2020 study showed that the highest tomato intake (1.8 cups per day) was associated with a 14% reduced risk of total mortality, a 24% reduced risk of coronary heart disease mortality, and a 30% reduced risk of cerebrovascular mortality.
When you hear pitches for restricting foods that focus on how one specific component impacts gut health, hormones or inflammation, your best bet is to adopt a healthy dose of skepticism. Just because one compound in a food is harmful to one biological system, that doesn’t mean the whole food is bad for the whole us!
What About Salt, Sugar and Cholesterol?
The Nutrivore Score does not include a correction or penalize for things such as added sugars, high sodium, saturated fats, cholesterol, oxalates, etc. Why? How these things impact our health is determined by the composition of the whole diet, not any one food in it, though ideally we would keep these compounds within optimal ranges.
The Nutrivore philosophy is to meet all of our body’s nutritional needs from the foods we eat. Since we’re looking at the quality of the diet as a whole, it doesn’t matter if some of the foods you choose are nutritionally underwhelming; they are more than made up for by the other foods you choose that supply ample nutrition.
That’s why a correction was not incorporated to the score to reflect those ingredients or inherent food compounds because their presence doesn’t make a food good or bad. It’s their overabundance in the diet that skews the diet towards a less healthy composition. Instead, Nutrivore.com includes very detailed nutrition information for each featured food so that you can identify those foods that do contain added sugars, sodium etc. and make an informed choice about how much of that food you would like to incorporate into your diet. That being said, sugars and fats do impact the Nutrivore Score because they impact the energy density of a food (the denominator of the calculation). When present at higher levels, the scores are lower.
Bottom line, no one food will make or break your diet or make or break your health!
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.
Buy now for instant digital access.
How Much Sugar Is OK?
We shouldn’t fear any food, including sugar, though it is important to eat it in moderation. Sugar consumed as part of our diet falls under 2 categories: added sugars and sugars inherent to foods.
Added sugars covers a few scenarios. These are sugars that are added as part of the manufacturing process. In this case it is required that they are listed on the label as ‘grams of added sugar’. Added sugars also includes sugar that you add to your foods at home, such as pouring maple syrup on pancakes or adding honey to your tea. Sugars inherent to foods are just that – sugars that naturally occur in the food such as sugars in whole fruit or milk. Total sugars includes both added sugars and sugars naturally found in foods combined.
When it comes to added sugars, the scientific evidence is clear that we want to cap that at about 10% of our total calories. If you eat a 2,000 calorie diet per day, that means limiting added sugars to 200 calories or 50 grams of sugar. This would be the equivalent of ~1/4 cup sugar, which leaves plenty of room for treats. The occasional day when you consume more than that is not a big deal! What matters is your eating patterns overall.
A huge 2014 study showed that consuming 10 to 24.9% of calories from added sugars increased cardiovascular disease risk by 30%, and consuming 25% or more of calories from added sugar increased cardiovascular disease risk by 2.75 times! Staying below the 10% calories from added sugars threshold doesn’t have any clear detriment to our health, so there’s absolutely room in a healthy diet for some sugar! It’s worth emphasizing that the 10% rule applies to added sugars, not carbohydrates in general or sugars that come from whole foods like fruit.
When you consider total sugars (added sugars plus sugars naturally found in foods), the science is also really clear that up to 25% of total calories is just fine as shown in this 2013 systematic review. Again, going back to the example of a 2,000 calorie per day diet, this translates to 500 calories of total sugars or 125 grams of sugar. This may sound like a lot but is literally the definition of sugar in moderation!
A few points to consider. If you have insulin resistance, you will want to be strategic about your sugar, such as having it with a meal that includes fiber, protein, and fat to help blunt the blood sugar response. It’s also important to remember that high sugar foods vary dramatically in terms of their nutritive value. For instance, fruit is packed with valuable nutrients and is very beneficial for our health whereas white sugar has no nutrients. Ideally most of the sugar in our diet would come from foods that are offering other nutrients. Provided we’re cognizant of the importance of eating sugar in moderation, a healthy diet can include sweet foods.
cITATIONS
Expand to see all scientific references for this article.
Ghavipour M, Saedisomeolia A, Djalali M, Sotoudeh G, Eshraghyan MR, Moghadam AM, Wood LG. Tomato juice consumption reduces systemic inflammation in overweight and obese females. Br J Nutr. 2013 Jun;109(11):2031-5. doi: 10.1017/S0007114512004278. Epub 2012 Oct 15. PMID: 23069270.
Gibson S, Gunn P, Wittekind A, Cottrell R. The effects of sucrose on metabolic health: a systematic review of human intervention studies in healthy adults. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2013;53(6):591-614. doi: 10.1080/10408398.2012.691574. PMID: 23627502; PMCID: PMC3630450.
Mazidi M, Katsiki N, George ES, Banach M. Tomato and lycopene consumption is inversely associated with total and cause-specific mortality: a population-based cohort study, on behalf of the International Lipid Expert Panel (ILEP). Br J Nutr. 2020 Dec 28;124(12):1303-1310. doi: 10.1017/S0007114519002150. Epub 2019 Aug 22. PMID: 31434581.
Shin JS, Lee KG, Lee HH, Lee HJ, An HJ, Nam JH, Jang DS, Lee KT. α-Solanine Isolated From Solanum Tuberosum L. cv Jayoung Abrogates LPS-Induced Inflammatory Responses Via NF-κB Inactivation in RAW 264.7 Macrophages and Endotoxin-Induced Shock Model in Mice. J Cell Biochem. 2016 Oct;117(10):2327-39. doi: 10.1002/jcb.25530. Epub 2016 Mar 11. PMID: 26931732.
Widjaja G, Doewes RI, Rudiansyah M, Sultan MQ, Ansari MJ, Izzat SE, Al Jaber MS, Kzar HH, Mustafa YF, Hammid AT, Turki Jalil A, Aravindhan S. Effect of tomato consumption on inflammatory markers in health and disease status: A systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical trials. Clin Nutr ESPEN. 2022 Aug;50:93-100. doi: 10.1016/j.clnesp.2022.04.019. Epub 2022 Apr 23. PMID: 35871957.
Yang Q, Zhang Z, Gregg EW, Flanders WD, Merritt R, Hu FB. Added sugar intake and cardiovascular diseases mortality among US adults. JAMA Intern Med. 2014 Apr;174(4):516-24. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13563. PMID: 24493081; PMCID: PMC10910551.
Should I Worry About Mercury in Seafood?
