You’ve probably read the stories touting that eating blueberries reduces the risk of dementia, that red wine is good for your heart, or that coffee protects against type 2 diabetes – or, indeed, many of the other great health claims for a particular “superfood.” But what is the truth in these statements?
While we, a group of nutritional scientists, have been involved in this type of research, we are not responsible for the headlines. Beneath those attention-grabbing stories, though, is serious, important research that will help keep us all happier and healthier.
We study parts of foods called bioactives that have an effect on health (either good or bad). Unlike vitamins and minerals, bioactive, such as certain fatty acids, fiber or flavanols (a group of compounds found, for example, in tea or apples), are not essential for survival, but they do affect our health.
The great challenge in bioactive research is separating the effect of a food from an individual compound (foods are incredibly complex and contain many compounds). in a Cup of coffee It is not some phenolic acids that have a positive effect on heart health, but other compounds that can increase cholesterol. This makes our investigation difficult, but also exciting.
We need to find ways to distinguish between the health effect of different parts of food in order to understand what is going on and ultimately provide more confidence in the recommendations we provide.
One way to learn more about the effect of individual foods on health is to compare people with different diets and follow them for a long time. That approach has helped us show that the Mediterranean diet – and the nordic diet – stay healthier for longer. But this approach is defective when we want to know more about individual foods or their components.
Foods are never eaten in isolation and it is incredibly difficult to break them down in such studies. To make the results of such research easier to understand, these findings are often converted into food equivalents: the infamous punnet of raspberries, cups of tea, or bottles of wine you should be consuming for your health. Actually, it is much more difficult.
Diet and health research is difficult because there are so many things to consider. They are not the essential nutrients we need to survive. There are dietary patterns that can affect overall health and are the basis of recommendations, such as those from the UK government. guide to eating well.
And then there are the bioactive compounds found primarily in plant foods that can have a beneficial effect on health.
Research on bioactives often results in surprising food headlines. It is actually just a small part of the food, which is often found elsewhere as well. A notable example is blueberries. They contain bioactives, but they are also expensive. Blackberries Y plums they provide the same bioactives, but are much cheaper.
Over the past few decades, we have learned a great deal about the chemicals found naturally in food: what they are and how they affect the body. Some of them confer benefits to our heart, brain, and gut that will help us run faster, bike longer, focus more, and relax more easily.
focus on variety
However, many of them cause problems when consumed in excessive amounts. For example, the flavanols in green tea can cause Hepatic injury when consumed in very large quantities. We are just beginning to discover if there is an ideal amount of these compounds that will provide maximum benefits. Until then, it’s safe to say that a varied diet is the best approach.
The best thing about our understanding of nutrition is that it is continually evolving and improving and we understand much better what foods to look for as research progresses.
Everyone should create some sort of diet portfolio that includes the essential nutrients, fiber, and bioactives needed to stay healthy and age well. Our bodies are incredibly complex and require many different vitamins, minerals, macro and micronutrients to keep us functioning optimally. It now seems likely that we need to add bioactives to this list. But no matter where they come from, the important thing is variety.
You should beware of dietary advice that suggests you exclude the variety of wonder foods on offer and focus on a few “superfoods” that seem to have magical properties. Nutrition is much more complex than that, and eating a healthy diet is much easier.
Gunther KuhnleProfessor of Nutrition and Bromatology, college of reading; charlotte millsProfessor of Human Nutrition, college of readingY Jeremy SpencerProfessor, Nutrition and Food Sciences, college of reading.
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.
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