Including different types of foods in your diet boosts your overall health and your gut health.

You’ve probably heard it’s a good idea to eat a variety of foods.  What is not often explained is why or how doing so can make a big difference to your energy level, immune system, health, and even your mood.

Why do you need different types of foods in your diet?

Simply put, your body needs a variety of different foods to be healthy and operate in a way that supports you feeling good.

This goes beyond eating the appropriate amount of calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fats.  These are known as “macronutrients” (or “macros.”) Your body needs macronutrients, but it also needs several other types of nutrients to function properly.

Some of these are called “micronutrients.”  Without them, it’s harder for your highly complex body to deal with modern life.  This includes protecting you from the effects of aging, stress, and less than ideal food choices.  It also includes helping your immune system protect you.

Your body needs to harvest from the food you eat a variety of micronutrients, including vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.  Only a few of these micronutrients you need from foods appear on food labels.

Besides macronutrients and micronutrients, your body needs phytonutrients!

What are phytonutrients?

Phytonutrients are bioactive substances that interact with your body’s tissue, cells, or organisms in your microbiome.  Some of them are classified as antioxidants that you may have heard of:   anthocyanidins found in berries, stilbenes such as resveratrol from berries and peanuts, or flavonols such as quercetin found in apples and onions.

There’s more in your food than what is on the food label.

Besides macronutrients, micronutrients, and phytonutrients, there’s another important substance your body needs to harvest from the foods you eat: biochemicals.

There are over 26,000 distinct biochemicals that can naturally occur in foods.  As with phytonutrients, these biochemicals aren’t on food labels and often aren’t even listed in the many food databases. Yet, they can play an important role in keeping you well and feeling good.

Take a simple clove of garlic, for example.  In addition to the protein, lipids, carbohydrates, vitamin C, and the mineral selenium found in garlic, there are many of these important biochemicals.  In fact, there are over 2,300 different components in garlic. Many of these are being investigated for possible roles in protecting your cardiovascular system and cancer prevention.

The complexity of foods and the many components they have is why eating a variety of foods each week is important.  Many scientific studies have shown that taking a pill or powder or drinking a shake does not have the same effect as eating the actual foods.

There’s a synergy that happens between the many components of the foods you consume at a meal that simply can’t be replicated with pills, powders, or “nutrition drinks” in a bottle.  Food and your body are amazingly complex!

Another reason to eat many types of foods: Bioavailability

Bioavailability has many meanings and variations, but for this blog post, I’m using a simplified definition:  Bioavailability is how well your body can harvest and use a component in a food.

How your body interacts with a food and accesses the calories, nutrients, and other biochemicals in the food can be dependent on the form of the food you eat.  A great example of this is flax seed.

Flax seed is promoted as a source of omega-3 fatty acids which are thought to help reduce the risk of heart disease and some forms of dementia.  But if you eat the flax seed whole, your body is unable to access those nutrients and biochemicals. Our gastrointestinal system, as marvelous as it is, simply can’t break the coating on the seed to access them.  This is why they will often show up whole in your poop.

Grinding flax seed takes care of that issue.  That breaks the coating so your body can access “the good stuff.” That’s a simple example of bioavailability.  (As I explain to people who see me for nutrition counseling, other issues also need to be considered with using flax seed as a source of omega-3s.)

Whether a food is cooked or raw can also affect bioavailability.  Cooking can destroy some nutrients and biochemicals, but it also can make others more available.

The other biochemicals in foods can make a difference!

Another aspect that can affect bioavailability is what else is in a food or what a food is served with. Different biochemicals can interfere with or enhance the bioavailability of a nutrient and make a difference in how much of that nutrient you actually absorb.  Let’s take calcium in spinach as an example.

If we compare the amount of calcium in one cup of cooked spinach to one cup of cooked bok choy it looks like you’d be better off eating the spinach, but that’s not so!

One cup of cooked spinach has 260 mg of calcium.  One cup of cooked bok choy has 160 mg per cup.  But because of the other biochemicals that exist in these foods, the amount of calcium your body can absorb from the spinach is far less.  There are only 13 mg of bioavailable calcium in the spinach, whereas the bok choy has 80 mg.

So here’s the way to simplify this:  Eat a wide variety of foods and, when appropriate, eat them prepared in different ways.

Your gut microbiome needs many types of food to be diverse and healthy

Your gut microbiome is the collection of organisms that live inside your gastrointestinal tract.  The ones in your large intestine are extremely important and affect a lot more than your bowel movements. (If you want to learn a little more about this, read this article:  “9 Ways your gut microbiome affects your overall health.”)

Research has revealed the number one influence on your gut microbiome is what you eat.  What we also know is varying the types of food you eat affects the diversity in your gut microbiome. That affects your health.  When you eat, you are feeding not just yourself but the entire community living in your body.

So, how can you get started increasing the types of foods you eat to benefit your energy level, immune system, health, and even your mood?

Unless you’re an experienced registered dietitian nutritionist as I am, it may be challenging to know where to start.  Here are five ideas to get you started:

5 ideas for increasing the different types of foods you eat

1. Think “eat the rainbow” every day and eat a variety of colorful vegetables and fruits each day.
2. Think how you could change up your breakfast.  Could you swap the fruit, vegetable, or high quality carbohydrate that’s part of your breakfast for another option?
3. Rotate your food choices by taking one of your “go to meals” and changing the protein, vegetable, or carbohydrate you use. It can be as simple as swapping broccoli for cauliflower or rice for quinoa.
4. Adjust your batch cooking by reducing the number of portions you make. Or,  divide the portion in half and change or add some different ingredients to one half of the batch.
5. Get help from an expert registered dietitian nutritionist like me.  So many of the people who see me for nutrition counseling need help expanding the variety of foods they eat.  That’s why in addition to talking about nutrition, I share recipe ideas and cooking tips with clients during our sessions. We also talk about how to achieve this when time, energy or money is limited.

Follow through with the steps above to get started on eating different types of foods during the week.  If you want personalized expert help, book a free call with me. We can talk about what you’re trying to accomplish and if having a session with me would be beneficial for you.  (Many insurance plans cover part or all of the cost of sessions with me!)

If you’re not yet ready for personalized help with improving your nutrition and health, instantly download your free guide, “5 Secrets to Successfully Changing How You Eat” for some ideas to help you get started on your own.