A strange irony of modern nutrition is this. We are living in an age of plenty. Supermarkets bulging with produce gathered from the four corners of the world. Whole streets lined with restaurants. Food- delivery pages promising to deliver food to within minutes. Though deficiency diseases once the scourge of sailors and peasants still survive today, but in a different guise. Deficiencies today do not manifest themselves quite so obviously, as scurvy and rickets. They often do not show themselves as such other than in the symptoms of fatigue, brittle nails, poor concentration and immune systems that give in to every cold. For the modern diet, which is still packed with calories, remains entirely short of the micronutrients that allow us to make full use of those calories.
Vitamins are not luxuries. They are the machinery of survival.
Instead of forming the bricks and mortar of the human body they are in most ways similar to the electrician and plumberno tissue gets built without them but without them nothing built will function. Vitamin D helps control calcium absorption and density of the bones. Vitamin C best known for preventing the effects of deficiency in “scurvy” is also vital in the synthesis of collagen and healing a wound. The B-complex work as components of co-enzymes in all probable metabolic processes in transforming the food we eat into energy usable by the body. A-vitamin has been identified as an essential protector of both our eyesight and our immune defenses. K regulates clotting. To omit any one of these gives a slow but ultimate undermining of the body in an accumulative process that we do not notice until we can’t ignore how we feel any longer.
The Myth of “Eating Enough”
Most people perceive that three meals a day, three square meals, will hit the mark for vitamins. This is a grossly naive belief. Volume does not equate to quality. A diet consisting mainly of refined cereals, preservatives, and takeaways can provide enough calories for people with anorexia, but it is a nutritional wasteland. With each industrial refining process, vitamins are stripped away by peeling, polishing, and removing foods’ more edible layers (wheat, for example, is polished to remove the germ, leaving only the endosperm). More sensitive, heat-labile compounds can be damaged or destroyed if food is overdone; vegetables like carrots and sprouts should be steamed, not boiled for too long, as their water-soluble vitamins, for example, end up in the dirty water.
So, the focus on diet needs to change from “how much am I eating” to “what am I absorbing.” Colorful foods are not simply a matter of visual presentation; they are a matter of biochemistry. Specific phytochemicals in specific colors in fruits and vegetables represent different vitamin makeups: orange, because of carrots and sweet potatoes, a precursor to vitamin A; green, because of spinach and kale, folate and vitamin K; and the red of tomatoes and peppers, vitamin C and more antioxidants.
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Building a Vitamin-Conscious Plate
Getting your vitamins into your everyday life doesn’t have to be another obsession with supplements or arduous queuing for meals. The most sustainable method is an architectural one it’s about changing the structure of the plate, notadding a supplementation layer on top as an afterthought.
Breakfast, perhaps the most overlooked meal, is an easy fix. Just a few citrus fruits or berries packs a punch with vitamin C and eggs unfairly beaten down as the least healthy food for years pack all of D, B12 and choline into one frugal food. Lunch and dinner should strive for ‘plate diversity’ as nutritionists put it: at least three colors of vegetables, a source of lean protein, and whole grains instead of refined. Nuts and seeds often gifts of snack time are quite unfashionable and this way underestimated sources of vitamin E and a handful of B’s.
Sunlight can be considered as nourishment as well! Of all vitamins, vitamin D is the odd one out as the body can make it when exposed to sunlight through the skin, so taking a walk in the sunshine can be just as nutritionally important as anything on a plate in particular for those living to the north of the country or idling away the daylight hours indoors.
The Case for Whole Foods Over Pills
The supplement industry has done a great job of taking advantage of our fears of the nutritional vacuum, but the case for food over pills has never been so convincing. Eating a whole food of course hits other, beneficial nutrients that work in concert with the vitamin, like fiber, phytochemicals, and cofactors present in the cell walls, that allow our bodies to absorb them optimally. (Extracted beta-carotene from a carrot is more efficiently used if taken with dietary fat and other plant compounds than if taken in isolation.) Supplements make sense in cases of deficiency, or during certain stages of life, like pregnancy, but for everyday, sensible eating, they are a stop-gap, rather than a solution.
A Quiet Revolution on the Plate
In the end, we need to include vitamins in our daily diet not so much as enforcer’s regiment but as feed that judgment that allows us the instinctone day, one season, one year at a time to eyeball color, comparing it with beauty, to envision the combination of textures and flavors that will refresh whatever ifs we are wearing; but avoid excesses. The body doesn’t need perfection. It needs persistency. One high-vitamin meal doesn’t break the one-month streak of eating poorly, nor does one foam of beer dug your heavy lager in Thursday. But rather, one habit. One about-to brighten subsecond glance toward the brightening fruit.
In a time when this obsession with over-the-top health interventions juice cleanses and extreme diets, miracle powders and pills perhaps the most radical gesture is also the simplest: to eat real colorful diverse food repeatedly and to leave it to the invisible scaffolding of nutrients and the human intelligence to take care of everything else.
