My favorite health food shop? - The fruit and veg section of the supermarket.

Why is it that plant foods are considered good for our health?

The short answer is - no one knows yet.

The longer answer is - plant foods contain thousands of chemical compounds, often with compounds that are unique to each plant food. As they are eaten and digested all of these compounds react with saliva, digestive enzymes, bacteria, and each other. Most common fruit, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and spices also tend to have cancer fighting compounds that are unique to each food, their function having been discovered only recently. What they all do to our body once they have all been digested and ingested is not very well understood, and it is very difficult to study in living humans. What is known is that they all act together in a synergy to promote good health.

Until the farming and industrial revolutions, humans largely lived nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Moving from food source to food source, eating a wide range of whole plant foods and wild animal foods, and doing some form of daily physical activity in order to continue to survive. It is also known that thousands of years ago, some animals were able to produce some of the vitamins that we now know we need, such as vitamin-C, however over many years of existing on plant foods they lost the ability to produce these vitamins and became dependent on dietary sources.

Could it be that our bodies have become dependent on the nutrients within these foods? The recent changes to our lifestyle that are a result of living in a modern world, are only a blink of an eye compared the long amount of time that humans lived as hunter-gatherers.

The areas of the world which still eat diets consisting mostly of whole plant foods and wild organic animal foods tend to have very low rates of all of the most common chronic diseases in the West. They also tend to have long life expectancies when basic needs for health are met, such as hygiene and available medical services.

What most people consider normal in the West, such as heart disease, cancer, type-2 diabetes, obesity, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. all happen to share similar risk factors - low consumption of whole plant foods, and a high consumption of processed foods and industrially farmed and produced animal foods - i.e. the Western Diet. They are all known to be conditions where you genes react with your lifestyle, could it also be due to a void of these plant nutrients seeing as they usually are destroyed and stripped away during the production of processed foods?

(back to talk of nutrition)

The list of known vitamins, minerals, amino acids, anti-oxidants and fat classes are just the tip of the ice-berg in the understanding of nutrition and health. Vitamins and their importance to health were only discovered in the early nineteen hundreds. In terms of nutrition as a science, to quote Michael Pollan, "nutrition is where surgery was at in the sixteen hundreds". With the current body of knowledge on nutrition, it is emerging that foods are far more than the sum of their parts. So, how can modern nutrition science help us promote health in our own lives and find a better way of living?

Something to chew on:

Maybe we're just allergic to the Western lifestyle, and the only truly effective answer to the epidemic of lifestyle related health issues in the West is to try to reclaim a more traditional way of living and eating?

We can fill in the blanks and try to explain this question over the next few hundred years in terms of nutrients and their functions if we really want to, however the evidence is there already today, you just need to see the bigger picture.


Practical tip: How can you replace something that you eat regularly that is a processed food, with a less processed and more natural alternative? Not only will doing this increase your intake of these beneficial and mysterious plant nutrients, they also tend to keep you full for longer and help to promote weight loss.



Alex Budlevskis
Exercise Physiologist
Rozelle Total Health


P.S. If you enjoyed this point of view, I thoroughly recommend that you read "In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto" by Michael Pollan. If you're not afraid of reading something controversial, then I also recommend reading "The China Study" by Campbell & Campbell.