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Just An Apple A Day? Why Whole Foods Are Best
- Lupita Ronquillo, Founder of Vegan Health and Yoga
- May 3, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 17
"Eat an apple on going to bed, And you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." ~1866 Welsh folk proverb
We are all familiar with the saying "an apple a day.." but do we know why? We know apples are a good source of vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, fiber, and carbohydrates. Some other benefits from apples are vitamins K, B6, boron, pectin, and natural sugar for energy. But are these the only reasons they keep the doctor away?
Absolutely not.
These nutrients are just the surface of an "iceberg" of elements contained in apples, and for that matter, elements in all fruits and vegetables.
Apples and other fruits and vegetables contain thousands of phyto-chemicals whose names are almost nowhere to be found in books nor would even be familiar to us. But these natural components all work together interdependently, like a huge team of doctors, each with a unique function to heal and build our health.
That's a lot of doctors!
What nutrition researchers have been doing for far too long is looking at single components in food. What they should be focusing on is how these phytonutrients interact as a "whole." Analyzing nutrients in an isolated sense will not only leave "holes" in discovering their full potential, it will likely produce an incomplete nutritional effect on the body and our health.
For the most part, this "standard" of research in isolating nutrients has been part of the problem in the field of nutrition. As a result of these studies, self-interested food companies have been successful at selling processed food and supplements marketed with a good source of (pick one!) nutrients, such as vitamin A, C, calcium or fiber. In the end, we've become obsessed with these "parts" for the sake of convenience, and more specifically, to treat symptoms more than building our health. Much to our loss, extracting or manipulating nutritional components as an attempt to "improve" what we eat would be like removing the door from a house. What can our body do with just a door?? Protection requires the whole house of nutrition!
Enriching our food with isolated "plant fragments" may be helpful to a certain point, but it doesn't provide us with optimal nutrition for preventing disease. The bottom line, is we will never get All of the nutrients, phytochemicals, and their interactions with each other from any bottle of vitamins or over processed food as we would from whole raw foods. So long as nutrition research continues to work in this way of evaluating single pieces of the puzzle instead of gaining more knowledge with the "bigger picture," medical schools, hospitals, and government agencies will continue to downgrade the whole foods concept as the true path to health.
Examining and validating this "whole house" of nutrition concept wouldn't be something new either. We already have information on how we can multiply the nutritional value from foods through a strategy known as food synergy. Instead of thinking of food in terms of 1+1 equals 2, research has already shown us that combining certain whole foods may exponentially more nutritional than eating these foods separately. The chart to the right provides a few known examples:
One way of understanding the concept of food synergy is the synergy of a church. One person's faith in the family unit can do a great deal of good by behaving as the role model for other members of their family. But there is great potential in combining the faith and talents of all individuals through a church community, for the purpose of building the kingdom of God. One person can only do so much. Nutritionally speaking, nutrients alone can only do so much without other nutritional components.
What's been discovered through food synergy is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers should continue focusing on finding these nutritional food relationships to keep unleashing the power of a whole foods diet, specifically for healing disease.
For now, it's time we start thinking for ourselves and eat food in its most original form as much as possible while ditching its manipulated and profit-making versions.
An apple a day is a good start but on average, Americans only consume around 20 pounds of apples a year, around 1 apple a week. Nowhere near the ideal of everyday. But if we choose to eat whole fruits and vegetables every day, and in the right combinations, we will have plenty of "doctors in our house" repairing our health.
Written by Lupita Ronquillo, founder of Vegan Health and Yoga
Some Sources:
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