How to be a Nutritarian!

Nutritarians By Crys

In the world of Paleo 2.0, the belief is that a whole food diet which includes adequate micronutrients is the best way to eat healthy. This means you should consider having nutrient rich foods as your staple, yes be a Nutritarian! This doesn’t mean you should ignore your intake of healthy fats, that definitely wouldn’t be Pale 2.0, where even obtaining a substantial fraction of nutrition from animal sources is necessary for health. However Dr. Joel Furhman of which ‘Whole Foods Market’ has adopted, came up with a formula for tracking the nutritional density of foods. This scale is called the Aggregate Nutrient Density Index (ANDI) and ranges from 1 to 1000, where 1 is the lowest and thus the least of nutritional value.

This scale is calculated with the formula H=N/C:

– H is Health

– N is Nutrition

– C is Calories

This is a great tool for a Primal lifestyle, where the intake of micronutrients are far more important than the volume of macronutrients, nutrition versus calories, so it helps to know what falls under micronutrient rich foods.

‘Whole Foods Market’ has a few top ten ANDI lists that are accessible from their ‘Health Starts Here‘ website, my favourite being the extremely nutrient dense green vegetables:

Green Vegetable	ANDI Score
1. Mustard/Turnip/Collard Greens	1000
2. Kale	1000
3. Watercress	1000
4. Bok Choy/Baby Bok Choy	824
5. Spinach	739
6. Broccoli Rabe	715
7. Chinese/Napa Cabbage	704
8. Brussels Sprouts	672
9. Swiss Chard	670
10. Arugula	559

Now that you’ve done away with the gluten grains in your diet, that’s right they’re still bad even though you’ll find a top ten list on ‘Whole Foods Markets’ (notice how low they are). It’s time to ensure you are incorporating one of the above vegetables at least once in every meal, thus you ensure that you are getting dense amounts of vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals.

3 Responses to "How to be a Nutritarian!"

christian jax says:

22 May, 2012 at 23:12

Here’s another great article from paleodietlifestyle.com that discusses micronutrients, definitely worth the read:

“Organ meats

When most people think of organ meats, they think of liver. Liver is the Paleo version of a multivitamin. It’s high in protein and packed with Vitamins A, B6, and B12, folate, iron, phosphate (also called phosphorous), zinc, copper, and selenium. The cholesterol in liver also helps you synthesize Vitamin D. Many people like to sauté liver with onions, but if you’re not the biggest fan of the taste, try toning it down with some liver pâté. You could also disguise the liver a little by including it in a recipe for hamburgers or meatballs, along with a healthy helping of ground beef and spices.

Other organ meats, like heart, kidney, tongue, or brain also provide many more micronutrients than traditional muscle meat – and as a bonus, they’re usually cheaper. Like liver, heart contains high levels of B vitamins, thiamin, folate, selenium, phosphorous, and zinc, and heart tastes very similar to a roast, making it more palatable if you’re used to muscle meat. Kidney is also a good source of Vitamins C and B12, selenium, iron, zinc, copper, riboflavin, and phosphorous. Like liver, kidney has a strong taste – mixing it with steak in a casserole can tone down the flavor, or go all-out and try some Irish kidney soup. Other organ meats include sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas glands of young animals), tongue, tripe, gizzards, and brains. The best place to get organ meats is from a butcher you know, but most supermarket meat sections have at least beef and chicken livers, and sometimes they have other organs behind the counter if you ask.

Kale

One cup of kale provides a hefty dose of Vitamin C, as well as manganese and Vitamins A and K. It also has smaller amounts of a variety of nutrients, including calcium, copper, and Vitamin B6. If straight-up kale tastes too bitter or tough for you, jazz it up with a little bacon, or whip up some kale chips for a salty, crunchy Paleo snack. Kale is also a wonderful ingredient in soups or stews.

Spinach

Popeye, as it turns out, was wrong: spinach isn’t actually a great source of iron. But it does deliver Vitamins A, C, and K, as well as folate and manganese. Spinach can make a delicious replacement for lettuce in any kind of salad, but if you don’t enjoy the taste, you can unobtrusively add quite a lot of spinach to a curry or any spicy dish: the leaves shrink drastically when you cook them, and the flavor is almost undetectable.

Mollusks

Mollusks pack an incredible nutritional punch. Mussels, clams, octopus, and oysters are powerhouses of B vitamins, and also have high levels of Vitamins C and A, riboflavin, niacin, iron, phosphorous, zinc, copper, manganese, and selenium. The last two make mollusks especially useful for anyone avoiding nuts: nuts are commonly cited as excellent sources of manganese and selenium, but they’re not the only ones. Mollusks can be as simple or as fancy of a dinner as you have time for. In a rush, you can steam them, throw some butter on top, and call it dinner. For a slightly more sophisticated meal, try steaming your mussels with tomato and basil, or spicing up your clams with some coconut-lime sauce. These oyster dolmades even include spinach, another nutritional MVP.

Seaweed

Seaweed is best known for its iodine content – iodine is an essential micronutrient that supports cell metabolism and healthy thyroid function. Most Americans have no problem getting enough iodine, since they consume huge amounts of processed foods loaded with iodized salt. But on a diet devoid of takeout pizza and Doritos, your salt intake is likely to be much lower, especially if you also switch to sea salt (which contains other minerals but does not provide iodine). This makes seaweed a smart addition to your meals, especially since it’s also full of all kinds of other minerals that it absorbs from the sea. You can eat seaweed as a salad, or add it to soups and broths for a salty, delicious flavor.

Bone broth

Bone broth gives you access to nutrients stored in the animal’s bones, which you wouldn’t get from just eating the meat. As well as containing generous amounts of minerals like calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous, bone broth is also a source of gelatin, which supports your body’s connective tissues (this is why it congeals when refrigerated – if you end up with beef Jell-O, you’re doing it right). As well as containing nutrients in its own right, bone broth also helps heal your gut from any damage caused by irritating foods or chronic disease, making you better able to absorb other nutrients. You can make broth on a stove or in your slow cooker. It does a while, but you can spend almost all of that time doing other things while your broth simmers slowly away.

Fermented foods

Fermented foods don’t necessarily contain high levels of nutrients themselves. Instead, they support the beneficial gut flora that allow you to digest and use those nutrients from other foods. For all these vitamins and minerals to do you any good, your body has to be able to process them first. Yogurt is the most common fermented food in the modern supermarket, but if you react poorly to dairy, you still have a wide range of options including sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, and water kefir. You can buy these at your local grocery store, or save a little money by making them yourself.

Sunshine

It’s not technically a food, but sunshine does deliver one essential micronutrient. When you go out in the sun, cholesterol in your skin reacts with the UVB rays to synthesize Vitamin D. While some foods (most notably fatty cold-water fish like salmon) do contain Vitamin D, sunshine is an essential part of the equation because most people can’t get enough from dietary sources alone.

Unfortunately, this makes the modern lifestyle the perfect way to develop a deficiency of one of the most important vitamins for overall health: most people work indoors, drive home to spend their leisure time inside, and wear sunscreen (which blocks the absorption of UVB rays and prevents the synthesis of Vitamin D) when they do go outside. Vitamin D is crucial for bone health; low levels of Vitamin D are also strongly associated with diabetes (both Type 1 and Type 2 ), metabolic problems, and obesity. Inadequate Vitamin D can provoke an autoimmune response in the gut, and some evidence also links low Vitamin D levels to certain types of cancer.

While you shouldn’t rush out to lie on the beach all day without sunscreen, regular sun exposure is the best way to make sure you get enough Vitamin D: do your body a double favor by combining your sun time with a walk or a swim.”

via Micronutrients for a nourishing diet

Reply
1. dilemme says:
  
  23 May, 2012 at 18:31
  
  I have heard that the accumulation of toxins in the liver makes it a bad choice to eat, so I did a little extra research and found that there are two things to look out for – one, eating liver once in a while is ok, but eating too much could cause vitamin A overdose. And two, it is better to eat the liver of an organically raised animal than one exposed to more toxins (as with all animal products).
  Cheers,
  
  Reply
  1. christian jax says:
    
    23 May, 2012 at 18:56
    
    A valid point. In our household all our meats are organic and we are slowly moving the same root for our fruits and vegetables. Presently we purchase from a CSA called the good food box ($34.00 gets us the large organic box): Good Food Box
    
    Reply

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