Colour-coded Diets
QUESTION:
I've seen quite a few diet books lately that are
based on the color of the foods you eat, including the rainbow
diet, the color diet and the "color code" (sounds like the
Da Vinci code, LOL!). Anyway, I've been reading your newsletters
for a long time and I know how you feel about diet pills, books
and gimmicks and I was wondering what you thought about these
programs. Is it just another gimmick?
ANSWER
Based on the clever titles, it might be tempting to dismiss these
programs as gimmicks, and in fact when your weekly menus are
literally "color coded," it might seem that the diet book authors
are just scrambling for a new hook or premise on which to base an
entire eating program.
I have not read any of those books you mentioned yet, so I can't
comment on any of them specifically. However, as "gimmicky" as
eating from every color in the rainbow may sound at first, there is
some very legitimate and scientific evidence that this is a great idea.
We are often given the advice to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables
(which have a variety of different colors). Good advice of course; even
common sense would tell us that. However, "eat a lot of fruits and
vegetables" is vague advice because it could mean eating only apples
and broccoli (red and green), and nothing else, but eating "a lot"
of them. To take that advice to the next level, a better recommendation
would be to eat a WIDE VARIETY of fruits and vegetables (not just "a lot").
Even "wide variety" is not really defined. What is a wide variety?
Did you know that there are hundreds of different types of fruits and
veggies? To make an even greater distinction, you could begin to sort
your fruits and vegetables by color and eat several types every day
(at least 5 to 9 servings) and an even wider variety spread over the
span of each week.
Why would you go to all the trouble? Well, each various food color is
indicative of the phytonutrients and other healthful nutritional compounds
found within these foods. According to the textbook Sports & Exercise
Nutrition by Katch, Katch & McArdle), over 4000 phytochemicals have
been identified, and 150 of them have been studied in detail.
By definition, phytonutrients (also called phytochemicals) are naturally
occurring, health promoting compounds found in the plant kingdom. There
has been much research on the functional properties of these compounds,
proving that they play important and diverse roles in maintaining your
health and protecting you from disease.
Foods such as tomatoes (red), carrots (orange), broccoli (green),
blueberries (blue) all contain important phytochemicals that play
specific roles in health and disease prevention. Onions, whole grains,
herbs, spices and other foods also contain their own special types of
protective phytochemicals.
Here are some of the phytochemicals and naturally health-promoting
compounds and the foods they correspond to
1
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