More superfoods and eating by color

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The various superfoods lists have a lot of overlap. Here’s another list that includes these foods:

• Beans  
• Blueberries
• Broccoli
• Oats
• Oranges
• Pumpkin
• Salmon
• Soy
• Spinach
• Tea (green or black)
• Tomatoes
• Turkey
• Walnuts
• Yogurt

Regarding tomatoes, I’ll note that their lycopene is not bioavailable until they are cooked, and red watermelon has more lycopene than tomatoes and its lycopene is bioavailable without cooking.

This reminded me of the interesting and useful book What Color Is Your Diet?, by David Heber, MD, PhD. He recommends eating at least one serving daily of each of seven groups of foods, each group labeled by the predominant color of the foods in the group. The color of vegetables and fruits, it turns out, offers some fairly good guidance to their nutritional values. Getting a good range of colors in your food intake supports getting good coverage of essential micronutrients.

Update: See also “We’re told to ‘eat a rainbow’ of fruit and vegetables. Here’s what each colour does in our body”.

I created a little chart (download the PDF file below) to track my own eating. I took it to Staples and had it laminated, and used a grease pencil to check off each group as I ate a serving from that group. By the end of the day, all seven groups should have a check, and I rubbed out the checks to begin again the next day. This version has columns for up to four people, so it can be used as a family thing — or it can be used by one person as a four-day chart. Give it a go—you’ll find that it encourages some new directions in your diet.

veggie-color-chartDownload

And here’s a version for 1 person for 3 weeks or for 3 persons for 1 week.

food-color-chartDownload

Note: About 12 years after writing this post, I switched to a whole-food plant-based diet. I had been following a low-carb/keto diet, but I become aware of the adverse long-term health risks from that diet, and I reconsidered my diet and then switched to the WFPB diet, which I describe in this somewhat lengthy post. I’ve now been on that diet for more than 4 1/2 yrs, and I find it fully enjoyable and satisfying.

In addition, after I had been on the diet for 10 weeks, my doctor told me to discontinue all the medications I was taking (for high blood pressure, for cholesterol, and for blood glucose control — I’m a type 2 diabetic). He said I no longer needed them, and he was right. My blood pressure is 120/72 and my HbA1c runs lower than 5.6% (most recently 5.3%) and my cholesterol and triglycerides are all in the middle of the normal range.