Feb. 16, 2024 – When it comes to your diet, your plate is important. Experts say it should include a healthy protein, whole grains, vegetables, and fruit. But rather than ration those ingredients, it might be easier – and healthier – to mix and match colors.
Not only does this rainbow-driven strategy fuel the body for its best performance, but it might help it prevent diseases or lower disease risk. By shifting the perspective from the plate to the rainbow, we start to understand that variety really IS the key to life.
“Our diet should ideally be a diverse combination of foods that allow certain compounds in foods to interact with one another as well as with systems in the body to produce health benefits,” said Christopher Browne, a Doctor of Chiropractic and director of human nutrition and functional medicine at the University of Western States in Portland, OR.
But not every type of food provides these benefits, especially “ultra-processed food, which has been the death knell of health in North Americans,” said Andrea Boggild, MD, medical director of the Tropical Disease Unit at Toronto General Hospital, and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.