/Our bodiesdon’tFirst, Eat Your Greens
by camilleI’ve grown up in a world that seems to have a pill for almost everything.
College kids pop caffeine pills to stay up all night writing papers, while our
parents are at home popping sleeping pills to prevent unwelcome all-
nighters. We can take pills for headaches, stomachaches, sinus pressure,
and cold symptoms, so we can still go to work sick. If there’s no time to eat
right, we have nutrition pills, too. Just pop some vitamins and you’re good
to go, right?
Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients,
but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin
C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the
body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When
I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coinci-
dences, realizing of course they’re not coincidences. Human bodies and
their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millennia in response to all
the different foods—mostly plants—they raised or gathered from the land
surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt
trauma, but they did not have diet- related illnesses like heart disease and
Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young
adults and children.
aren’t adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once
(many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny
quantities of them in combinations—exactly as they occur in plants. Eating
a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to
research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You
have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all dif-
ferent colors you’ll get carotenoids to protect body tissues from cancer
(yellow, orange, and red veggies); phytosterols to block cholesterol absorp-
tion and inhibit tumor growth (green and yellow plants and seeds); and