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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.
Why Is It Important To Focus on Nutrients?
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, 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. 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 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 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 our bodies need from the foods we eat. So, Nutrivore is not just a dietary philosophy but the broad knowledge base to help us achieve it!
How Do Nutrient Shortfalls Lead To Disease?
Nutritional deficiency refers to when your intake of an essential nutrient is so low that you develop a disease of malnutrition, such as iron-deficiency anemia (iron), scurvey (vitamin C), rickets (vitamin D), beriberi (vitamin B1), pellagra (vitamin B3), and night blindness (vitamin A). About one third of Americans are at risk of nutrient deficiency, resulting in diseases of malnutrition.
Dietary insufficiency can also be thought of as a dietary shortfall or “not getting enough nutrients from our diets,” and refers specifically to the situation where someone is almost never meeting the dietary recommended intake of that essential nutrient, but their intake is not so low as to cause a deficiency or a disease of malnutrition. Almost everyone has dietary shortfalls of essential nutrients. In fact, studies evaluating not just the average American’s diet, but also people following various diets billed for their health-promoting effects, show rampant nutrient shortfalls. For at least ten essential nutrients, more than half of the U.S. population is falling short of dietary requirements; and for at least four essential nutrients, more than 90 percent of us aren’t getting enough from the foods we eat.
The reason why we care about insufficiency is that it increases the risk of just about everything that can go wrong with our health. So, how does that work? Nutrients can be used as building blocks for everything that makes us us—as energy or as components of the chemical reactions of life, as reagents (the things that go into those chemical reactions), as cofactors (things that facilitate those reactions), and they can be components of enzymes that catalyze those reactions. Every biological system—the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the gastrointestinal system, etc.—requires nutritional resources to do its job.
Some nutrients are ubiquitous, like B vitamins, which are required for making cellular energy, so they’re important for every biological system. Other nutrients differ in terms of how much each biological system requires. But when we don’t get enough of a nutrient that a biological system needs to do its job, it puts strain on that system. Our biology is amazing—we’ve got lots of redundancy systems built in. That’s why a nutrient shortfall doesn’t automatically cause a disease of malnutrition.
Instead, not getting enough of a nutrient can cause a chemical reaction to slow down a little bit, or maybe there’s a slight change in the chemical reaction that produces a slightly different product that’s not as good but can still mostly do the job. Or maybe the same product is produced in the same amounts, but an unwanted byproduct is also made. What happens is a “nickel and diming” effect: a little bit of extra strain is put on that biological system over time. That strain, due to inadequate nutritional resources, interacts with other factors—our genetics, our social and physical environments, and our health behaviors—and increases the risk of developing a disease impacting that biological system. Because it’s not a disease of malnutrition, it’s not a one-to-one correlation, but it’s still a good reason for us to identify dietary shortfalls and try to make changes to our diets to remedy them.
Nutrivore is a way to help remedy that by determining nutrient-dense foods that can help combat dietary insufficiencies.
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Non-Essential Does Not Mean Not Important!
What is a non-essential nutrient? It’s really important to distinguish the term non-essential from non-important because when you say a nutrient is non-essential, it sounds like we don’t need it or it doesn’t matter if we get it from our diets. However, just because non-essential nutrients don’t cause a disease of malnutrition when we don’t get them from our food, it does not mean that we are healthy without them. Non-essential nutrients are still important.
Let’s look at a few examples to demonstrate this concept. Fiber is a non-essential nutrient, yet the more fiber we eat, the lower our risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, and diseases of the gastrointestinal tract like diverticular disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and irritable bowel syndrome. For every 10 grams of fiber we add to our diets daily, we reduce the risk of all-cause mortality, a general indicator of health and longevity, by 10%. The mechanisms for why fiber benefits us are well understood: fiber feeds a healthy gut microbiome, and our gut bacteria influence every aspect of our health. Consuming fiber with our meals helps regulate blood sugar levels and maintain the health of the gastrointestinal wall. Furthermore, there is a wealth of clinical trials showing that increasing fiber intake provides numerous benefits—lower cholesterol, lower markers of inflammation, improved insulin sensitivity, blood sugar regulation, and improved gastrointestinal symptoms. Just because there isn’t a clearly defined disease of malnutrition (like scurvy with too low vitamin C intake) doesn’t mean that getting enough fiber isn’t critically important for supporting our overall health. That’s why, even though it’s non-essential, it has a recommended dietary intake: 14 grams per 1,000 calories. So, if you eat a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet, you should be aiming for 28 grams of fiber.
Another example is the long-chain omega-3 fats, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). These fats are non-essential, but still very important. The omega-3 fat that is labeled as essential is the shortest omega-3 fat, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). This is because, technically, our bodies can convert any omega-3 fatty acid to any other omega-3 fatty acid, but that conversion is very inefficient. This is why it’s vastly superior to get our long-chain omega-3 fats, EPA and DHA, from food, particularly seafood. These fats are crucial for cardiovascular health, neurological health, and immune health. We know that the higher your intake of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids or seafood, the lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, age-related cognitive decline, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. There is a vast collection of clinical trials showing that fish oil supplements (which contain DHA and EPA) improve serum lipid profiles, lower markers of inflammation, and support overall health. Even though there isn’t a deficiency disease of malnutrition associated with DHA and EPA, these fatty acids are still vital. There is a recommended dietary intake of 250 milligrams.
These are just two examples but there are many non-essential nutrients that are beneficial for our health when we get more of them from our diets. So, the important take-home message is when it comes to nutrients, don’t mistake the term non-essential for non-important.
Can Too Many Nutrients Be Harmful?
Is there too much of any nutrient that is not healthy? The answer to this question is yes—many nutrients have what’s called a tolerable upper limit, which is basically a maximum amount we don’t want to exceed. Usually, the tolerable upper limit is set quite far below what would be considered a chronic toxicity dose. Similar to acceptable daily intake levels set for food additives, there’s a safety factor applied. Whether or not there’s a tolerable upper limit for a nutrient has a lot to do with how well our bodies can control the levels in our system. For example, do we passively absorb it or actively absorb it? Is there some kind of control on how much of the nutrient we absorb to prevent us from absorbing too much? Do we store it or not? While we store all nutrients to some degree, some nutrients are stored in larger amounts. Are we able to excrete it if we consume too much, or does it just keep building up in our bodies? The answers vary for different nutrients. For example, B vitamins, which are water-soluble, don’t have a tolerable upper limit because it’s easy for our bodies to excrete any extra. Vitamin C has a tolerable upper limit based on causing gastrointestinal symptoms. Vitamins A, D, and E all have tolerable upper limits, but vitamin K does not. Usually, nutrient toxicity is typically seen only in the context of supplementation and not via dietary intake of whole foods. In practice, this means we generally don’t need to worry about the vitamin and mineral upper limits when we’re consuming whole foods. However, there are a few foods that are such amazing sources of nutrients that overconsuming them can push you past the tolerable upper limit and even potentially into chronic toxicity levels. Examples of exception foods include liver, which can give you too much copper and vitamin A, which means it should be limited to about one serving per day; Brazil nuts, where just 10 a day can bring you to chronic toxicity levels for selenium; and certain types of seaweed, like kelp, which can provide too much iodine. That’s why it’s always good practice to speak with your doctor or a nutritionist when it comes to matters of your health and any potential risk from under/over-consumption. This is also why eating a wide diversity of foods as part of a balanced diet is beneficial. It ensures that you’re getting a broad spectrum of nutrients and also helps prevent you from overdoing any one food that could reach toxic levels of certain nutrients if consumed excessively.
If you want to look up the tolerable upper limits for specific nutrients, you can find that here. This area of the website includes the recommended dietary intake levels for different genders and age groups, or adequate intake if an RDI is not set, and includes tolerable upper limits, if applicable.
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Plant Protein vs. Animal Protein
