The Rainbow Diet Concept and Power of Plant Color

Welcome, Doctor. Hello, Michael. Hello, everybody. Great to be here with you on this Saturday. I do have a presentation that I'd like to bring up to kind of go through the Rainbow Diet. All right, we're excited to see it. The floor is yours. Okay. Here we go. Hmm. Okay. And by the way, a lot of the content that I'm going to be talking about here is found in my book, the Rainbow Diet, which just came out in February, hot off the press, very colorful, all color coded in terms of the different sections. So what I'm going to tour you through is color and why color is so important. So for some of you who were on yesterday, you learned that I have four basic premises when it comes to food and eating. They would be color, creativity, diversity, and rhythm. So I'm going to drill into the color aspect and give you some of the latest science and creative ways that you can bring more color to your diet, which means that you will have a more colorful life. So here we go. And by the way, you might want to pull out a piece of paper, a pen. I'm going to give you some tools as we go and maybe even walk you through a couple of activities, if you're open to it. Please note that this is educational and not prescriptive. This is not meant to take the place of advice from your own practitioners. So no diagnosing or treating. This is education and inspiration to take back to your healing team to have a conversation. All right, so here's my outline. I'm going to tour you through the spectrum. And because I'm very focused on color, I'm very focused on plants. So I'm going to be talking about plants and phytochemicals and talk about the latest science and then put that information into action with some ways that you can bring more color into your everyday life. So let's first talk about plants. You know, why am I talking about plants? You know, I've studied nutrition. I have, you know, spent three years doing my master's, four years doing my PhD. I would even say that my nutrition information goes back to when I was 8 years old, because my mother was really health conscious and raised us with this awareness around food and eating. And I would say that I kept coming back throughout my nutrition training to what has the most data, what is strongest, because, you know, what you see in nutrition is that people tend to arm wrestle. They arm wrestle data, and they say, oh, there's no data for eggs. Oh, there's no data for soy. Oh, there's no data for this or there's data for this, you know, and, and quite honestly, as a scientist, what I can say is that you could cherry pick the data. There is so much data available through scientific publications. It's very easy for people to slant things in the way that they want it to go. But the one thing that I don't think you can arm wrestle effectively is eating more in the way of plants. Now you might say, well, Deanna, what about anti nutrients and lectins and oxalates and goitrogens? We'll get into all of that, but that's like a small sliver. I would say that the preponderance of data looking at chronic disease and looking at health and well being really do center around plant foods. Now, of course, there's a lot of context to that and we'll get into that. And I'm not just talking about fruits and vegetables. Let's expand your mind and be thinking about herbal tea, your spices, lots of different nuts and seeds, if you're able to do those. Of course, don't take it in the way of that. Everything I'm mentioning that everybody can do because in functional medicine we honor personalization and individualization. Right? Everybody's different. You might be different at different times of your life. But what I could see from the data is that there's a lot of data to support eating plants. And the reasons why are the following. Like if you were to say, okay, come on, just tell me, what are like the top reasons? Well, if you just break them down in terms of nutrition, they're very nutrient dense, right? So you get a lot of potassium, you get a lot of magnesium. Just think of how many people are deficient in magnesium. We hear about that all the time. The connection between magnesium insufficiency and type 2 diabetes, magnesium and muscles, magnesium and sleep. Many people are low in magnesium, not to mention potassium as well, which is important for healthy blood pressure, healthy muscle, muscle relaxation and function, brain health. So those, those things are very important for us. Also vitamins, you know, you think about vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D. There are certain micronutrients that are important as well as minerals. So when we think of micronutrients, typically I'm talking about vitamins and minerals. And so in plants, depending on what you're eating, if you're eating more root vegetables, you might get more minerals. If you're eating more leafy parts, you might be getting some minerals like magnesium, but then also some vitamins and some fibers as well. Now, what most people are just learning about, I would Say over the past 10 to 15 years in nutrition is that there is another class of compounds called phytochemicals. Phyto means plant chemicals or nutrients would be the chemicals or nutrients within the plants. And it seems like these phytochemicals are playing many different roles in our bodies. They don't have calories, they don't provide energy in the way of caloric fuel. But there, there are thousands of them and they're doing so many different things like playing a role in our hormones, inflammation, our stress response. So we're going to get into that a little bit and I'm going to tour you through all the different colors of food and, and all the different phytochemicals within those different colors. So the other thing is that plant foods, unless you overcook them, they tend to be anti inflammatory, right? Or unless you're buying just regular conventionally grown plant foods which can be laden intoxicants like pesticides, insecticides and herbicides. So either you grow them on your own or, or you buy organic varieties. So there's kind of a knack to how to prepare plant foods. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about raw, steamed, cooked, overcooked, and what does that mean? So now some of you might be thinking, well Deanna, I don't need studies to tell me to eat fruits and vegetables. Well, I think some of us need some inspiration or some creative ways to kind of bring back and understand why it's so important. Because people are still eating what I call the white, brown and yellow diet. And what that means is that many people are eating foods that actually accelerate their aging process through the process of inflammation. So when you see foods like you're seeing here in the screen, these are foods that have a lot of advanced glycation end products, meaning that when you have protein and sugar and you bring those together in the complex of heat, you start to get this brown color. You know, at, when I was at the university, I taught a course called Food Science and there is what is called the Mallard reaction. So you have this browning effect that happens with the fats and that brown color, even though for us it may taste good, it's actually not very healthy. So in many ways you can make food even more inflammatory just by how you cook food. Right. So many people are still eating in this way of white, brown and yellow. And as my mother used to say, the whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. I don't know who she took that from. Probably Adele Davis or Somebody. But there was some truth to that even back in the 1970s when I was a kid. So overall, people are coming up short. Even the healthiest of us are still having occasions where we're coming up short. Maybe we're traveling, maybe we are working and we don't have a lot of time to prepare. So we're kind of eating on the run. We try to do the best we can. Of course, you know, you don't have to be perfect or orthorexic or, you know, we, what we're trying to do here is come up with inspiration, inspiring creative ways to make eating fun. Right. But I do want us to all realize that most people are still coming up short when it comes to whole fruits. And we know that there's a connection between fruit intake reducing the risk of things like depression. Okay, did you hear that? Because that's a little bit different than we normally think about with fruits and vegetables. Usually we hear about, you know, five a day, help reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and cancers of various types. But now what we're seeing is that different fruits and vegetables may also be helping us with mental health. The other thing is fiber. What we get with plants is fiber. You don't get fiber from meat. Now I'm not saying not to eat meat, but what I'm saying is if you're only eating meat, like following a carnivore diet, you're not getting the necessary fiber that you need to nourish the gut microbiome. That's a really big deal. It's a big deal for your gut. It's a big deal for your brain ultimately to have that fiber. So we're still getting too little is the takeaway. If you look at ancestral diets to see what people were eating back in the 20th century, the 19th century, you keep going back and you say, well, what were people actually eating at that time? What we see is that our gastrointestinal tract, our cardiometabolic and our immune systems evolved on high fiber plant based diets, which would be in excess of about 50 grams of total fiber per day. Now that doesn't mean it was solely plant. It's not like they were vegan. But they were on high fat fiber diets. And that looked like wild berries, different fiber rich edible plants. We just don't have the diversity of those plants like we used to. Right. Has shrunken significantly, which has its implications. And also with the advent of convenience and convenient foods, processed foods, we kind of did away with a lot of the fiber because it kind of gets in the way of the processing of the food, potentially. So fiber, even though you've heard it before and it doesn't sound like it's a new thing, what's new and what has been consistent is that we are still falling short in fiber. So the way that I was trained and the way that I my orientation into nutrition is that indeed food is medicine. It's actually a lot of things. Right? Just think about this for yourself right now. What are all the things that food represents for you? So is that food is medicine, food is healing, food is connection, food is energy, it's fuel. Think about all the things that it does present for you. What I would say is that colorful whole plant foods are nature's medicine. Not even plant based, just plant foods or. Right. So look at this beautiful spectrum below of each of those colors. It's kind of like eye candy as well as nutrition for the body and soul. So usually when people say, oh Deanna, you talk about eating the rainbow, what does that mean? Does that mean I can eat food dyes and candies that are brightly colored? Well, no. So let me just make that clear because when I'm talking about the rainbow diet, I'm talking about nature's colors, not human made colors like you see here. Now actually, I had one year for my birthday, my team had made and ordered a cake that was made from all natural food dyes. Like the red was from beets, the orange was from turmeric. Like there is a way to actually make a cake like this and use nature's colors, not synthetic food dyes that are problematic. Right. So I just want to clarify that when I'm talking about the rainbow diet, I'm talking about nature's rainbow, not the synthetic rainbow that we have created through chemicals. But you all knew that, right? So plants are the ultimate eating unifier. So yesterday Michael was asking me, hey, Deanna, what do you think about all these different diets out there? Well, the unifying stem of like almost like the stem of a plant, you have all these leaves of diets, right? There are going to be more. You know, just when you think you've heard all of the diets possible, there are more that will come up, right? And we don't even have pegan on here, but all kinds of diets. To me, it doesn't matter. What we're looking at is the quality of the diet. And what runs through many of these eating styles is plants. And you would say, wait a minute, Deanna, what about the omnivore Diet that's eating meat. Well, guess what? What do animals eat? They have to eat plants, many of them. So we are still getting, even in small amounts, some aspect of plants, because quite honestly, 80% of the planet is, is this plant biomass. And I call plants smart. They're smarty plants, right? They hold the planet's intelligence. And when we eat that, plant intelligence is better informing our own physiology and psychology. So to me, it doesn't matter as long as you're getting plants on one of these eating programs. Whatever is personalized to you would be most appropriate. Every time you eat, you're eating a universe of phytochemicals. Humans have not even codified all of the different biological bioactive food compounds. All of these phytochemicals. We don't even really know how many there are because there is what is in the plant. Then sometimes that changes when we're cooking it, and then it will further change when it gets into our bodies and the gut microbiome starts to work on all of those phytochemicals. We start to get a whole universe within our body of all of these metabolites. And sometimes when we take in the plant, it's not as active, but once it gets in the body and we start to convert it through the gut microbiome, it becomes even more active. So it's really hard to say how many phytochemicals we find in nature, but there is a general estimate out there of maybe something on the order of 10 to 25,000 different food constituents. So we're eating a lot of different things out there. And I think that nature is intelligent, right? And there's a reason why we have a certain ratio of compounds in a food. This has been referred to as food synergy, right? You've got all the different colorful compounds working together. Sometimes when we isolate one compound and we increase it and that's separated from its matrix that it was in, in nature, now it has a different function, right? And sometimes it can lead to different effects, either therapeutic effects or toxic effects, which is why I always look to the plant in its perfect composition to provide us with the synergy of all of the different compounds. So that's why I am very much an advocate of the wholeness of plants. So when we think of the holism versus reductionism, it's not to say that it's not a good thing to reduce a plant into one thing, because if we just take turmeric, we take turmeric as a root, right? You go to the store, you see the turmeric, you buy it, you can grate it, you can put it into your smoothies, you can put it into a stir fry. But some people will want a little bit more of the anti inflammatory impact of turmeric. They may need to have isolated curcuminoids in a dietary supplement as an example. So this is sometimes where nature is used depending on what strength we want. Is it the everyday kind of we're chronically seeing that plant in its whole matrix form or are we layering in a therapeutic targeted approach? And you know, I do both because sometimes you need a little bit more. But we have to realize that there are things to watch out for when we start to remove things from plants and just have it in isolation from all of the other family of compounds that that plant contains. So here you go. And I want you to think if there are other things that I could have put on this list. Here is a spectrum of plant options. Some of the ones that I'm thinking about, there are edible flowers. And I'm curious how many of you go to the farmer's market or order from a community supported agriculture CSA where you get local food, you get local fruits and herbs, you get what is in season from the farmers and what is being grown. One of my favorites is spices. Spices are pretty fantastic. And I know I'm talking about the rainbow. And the rainbow also applies to tea, like herbal teas, as well as spices. And actually each. And even mushrooms. I didn't even put mushroom. You know, mushrooms are fungi and so they're a little bit separate from the plants. But I kind of think about them as like a close relative. Right. So we could even include them. I even did a rainbow of mushrooms on one of my social media graphics. I did a rainbow of spices. Actually just recently I put that on Instagram. You can have a rainbow of nuts and seeds. Right? So it's not just fruits and vegetables. It's much broader than that. Now I do want to just briefly talk about anti nutrients because some of you are probably thinking, oh, she's talking about plants. But I can't eat certain things. And you know, probably, you know, not all of us can eat all foods on the planet. That's just the nature of our bodies. And we have to be personalized, we have to be aware of those things. But people have come to me and said, deanna, I don't think I can eat a lot of these plants because I thought that they were toxic. I thought that they had lectins and oitrogens that would impact my thyroid. And what about phytates? And what about phytoestrogens? Are these things healthy or are they going to change my gut, change my immune system? Well, actually, I was very curious about this for myself. So one of my graduate students, Weston Petroski, and I put together this review article where we looked at the science of anti nutrients. They're called anti nutrients for the most part, because the idea is, is that some of these compounds may change up the nutrient levels or the absorption or compete with certain nutrients in our bodies. And what I have to say is that in the summary of the article, what we concluded was that basically many of us are eating foods outside of the traditional way that foods were eaten. I mean, just think about it. If we think back into the 19th century, how many people were having raw kale smoothies, right? How many people were having just, you know, just these different applications of foods and in high amounts. So when we start to change the traditional method of cooking and fermenting and so soaking, we may start to see some other effects. But in general, we can modify the levels of those anti nutrients, which actually tend to also be, if you flip them over to the other side to look at phytonutrients, some of them are actually quite medicinal. So it's all about the dose, it's all about the, the food preparation, and it's all about you and how those things interact. This is just a short list of some of the ones that I was mentioning. You probably have heard of lectins and oxalates and phytates and tannins. I mentioned phytoestrogens, goitrogens, and sometimes people talk about sulfur and not being able to tolerate sulfur, needing to follow a low fodmaps diet. Well, I do think that if you have certain conditions, like if you look at the far right there, and Dr. Rajdhani has done some great work on autoimmunity. Well, if you have an autoimmune condition, there may be an upregulation in your immune response to certain things. If you're having legumes and they're not completely cooked or they're not cooked in the proper way of letting them soak and let, let a lot of the, the, the food kind of change its composition so that it's more digestible. And let's just say that somebody has poor digestion to begin with. Yeah, there might be some undigested proteins that may create an immune response. So just be aware of that, that it's not just about a food and Pointing the finger to the food. We also need to look at what's happening in our guts and is that food actually signaling that we have something going on in the body that needs to be addressed. So then down at the bottom there, you see that most traditional preparation methods, including cooking and boiling, soaking, fermenting, roasting, milling and sprouting have been shown to reduce the activities of some of these compounds. So when in doubt, definitely check with your practitioner in terms of looking at what foods you might be reacting to. Because there are food allergy tests, there are ways to determine if you have a food intolerance. And, you know, you gotta listen to your own body. If you can't eat certain foods or you're prone to oxalates or kidney stones. Yeah, it may not be a good idea to eat lots of Swiss chard and raw spinach. Right. So it just behooves us to learn more about our bodies through the experience of eating. This is just. I'm not going to tour you through this. This is just kind of looking at the different anti nutrients, their food sources, and some of the things that have been documented or some of the potential concerns that people have. So again, the preparation tips, I think it's important to again, look at how we're cooking things and do our best to. To cook them well and also kind of balance that with maybe there are certain things that need to be eaten more raw. Right. It's not just only cooking and cooking one way for all foods, as you can imagine. I also think that people get into food ruts. How many of you just eat the same thing over and over and over? Maybe you don't even realize it, but let's just say, you know, you get in your routine, you've got your daily rhythm, and you don't really have something that kind of kicks you out of the box of just doing the same thing. Right. When I see that people are in a food rut eating the same thing every day, many times it tells me they're in a life rut. And what we benefit by is rotating foods every three to four days. It's a really good idea to start to rotate, even if it's a small amount of rotation. But having small amounts of a variety of whole foods rather than, you know, for some people, they just say, like, I can only have 10 foods, that's all I can have. Right. So I think it's important for the gut and building better gut health by having smaller amounts of whole foods. All right, so hopefully I made the case for plants And I saw it with you from different angles. Even looking at anti nutrients. Right. In the personalization aspect, what I want to do here is talk about newer documented effects. So I want to look at how can we go beyond antioxidants? I'm sure you've heard of plants being important because they are a source of antioxidants. You know, that's kind of a, it's an older term, but in general, plants can help us with a number of things. One thing is that they supply, supply us with antioxidants. So things like vitamin E, vitamin C, polyphenols. I want you to know what those are. Polyphenols are plant compounds found in tea and also berries and apples and certain vegetables and carotenoids, which are things like beta carotene, alpha carotene. So in general, plants can give us antioxidant compounds outright. Then what we can also do is those plant compounds, certain of them can help to increase our internal antioxidant defense. Now the only thing I want to mention here is some people like to take antioxidants as a supplement. And again, just isolating one of those antioxidants, like taking beta carotene in a high amount and just having that without other carotenoids. Right. I again, it takes me back to food synergy. And that's why even taking vitamin C as a supplement, what I think is perhaps a better approach is more of a whole food form of vitamin C where you also have bioflavonoids to support the activity of vitamin C. The other thing that I think we all need to be thinking about is the toxin load that we're up against. Indeed. You know, this planet is presenting us with toxins in food, air and water, things like toxic elements, things like mercury and arsenic and lead and cadmium, things like phthalates and bisphenols. Right. The plastics, things like persistent organic pollutants. Pops. Right. So what? And even if we buy organic, organic isn't 100% pure. Right. It's still going to have, just by way of the environment being toxic, still going to have some contamination. So what's important here is that we want to reduce the inflammation that can happen as a result of increased toxin load. Some of the ways that we can do that is through some plant compounds like polyphenols. And in this article they were also talking about omega 3 fatty acids, which are very important to help with the balance of inflammation in the body. The other thing that plants can give us is folate, vitamin B9, and that can Help us with the removal of certain toxic elements like arsenic. By the way, arsenic is one of the number one toxins that we have to deal with some of the. And arsenic occurs in water, in food like chicken, apple juice and rice. And it's, it's in the environment. Right. It's just in the air as well. And arsenic is connected to things like increasing the risk for type 2 diabetes. And many times when we think of rice, we think of the high glycemic load, but also the arsenic content of rice, which could be impacting the risk for type 2 diabetes. What I find to be inspiring is that plants have been shown to help with mental health. So eating more fruits and vegetables, believe it or not, has been associated with less psychological distress and better mood. So if you haven't been in a good mood lately, look at your plate. What are you eating? Is it colorful? Colorful foods make for colorful moods. There are a number of studies now showing that adolescents, children, different people of different ages are being impacted psychologically and in a good way by foods that they're eating. And one of the foods that we're going to talk about with brain health and better mood is blue, purple foods, which is a color that most people don't get in the daily diet. So what you can see here is just going to move that, that as you eat more fruits and vegetables, what tends to happen to life satisfaction? Right. Look over here on the far left. So satisfaction with one's life goes up when your fruits and vegetable servings go up. So there's a sense of contentment, a sense of satisfaction, well being that we see when people are eating more fruits and vegetables. The other thing that's quite interesting is that eating plants is associated with happiness, life satisfaction and well being. And if you say, well, Deanna, like to what degree? Like somebody just has a general feel good experience? Well, actually the psychological level that that's been measured as is transitioning from not having work to having work, especially if somebody is stressed out about that. Right. And so having up to eight servings per day, fruits and vegetables is positively associated with well being. So again, ask yourself the question, how, how do I feel? Colorful foods, colorful moods. The other thing I wanted to mention here is that more research is coming out on why it's important to eat foods in season. Okay. So depending on where you live, you may need to adjust this a little bit. But here is an animal study where the researchers were looking at. Now this was in animals, right? So this wasn't in people. But what they did was they changed the environment of the rats so that it would mimic either summer or winter. And then they gave them oranges that were grown in either the northern or the southern hemisphere. And what they found very interestingly, and this is just even after 10 weeks, is that when the winter group was given the orange that was in the southern hemisphere, like it would be summertime, that they showed some changes in. In fat accumulation. Now, keep in mind that these amounts are probably more than most people are eating. And it was every day. Right. They also found that oranges that were grown in the summertime in the Southern hemisphere differed in their composition compared to oranges grown in the Northern hemisphere, which is really fascinating, isn't it? So what we're learning is that certain foods grown in season are rich in certain compounds that can potentially connect into certain centers of the brain that regulate metabolism, Right? And so looking at that light, dark cycle, the seasonal rhythm, our polyphenols that we take in, and those two things coming together through this change. So when we're eating out of season, it may lead to metabolic disregulation. So ideally, if. If you can, it would be important to eat local and in season. The other thing that I think is kind of interesting is that if we're thinking about the brain and we're thinking about neurotransmitters, we think about hormones. What we see is that plants actually contain their own neurotransmitters. So it's interesting because plants don't have a brain like we do, but yet they contain things like acetylcholine, which many times we think about in relationship to memory. You can see here some of the foods that would contain that food. They. We also see that they contain glutamate, gaba, dopamine, serotonin, histamine. So plant foods are very, I would say, active. And I don't know if we completely understand why plants contain these neurotransmitters and how they interact in our bodies. And. But I think it's of interest to note that we're eating a lot of phytochemicals, potentially with some activity in the gut and elsewhere. All right, so I want to talk a little bit more about what plants are doing, because there are some newer things. They're doing many different things. They wear many hats. They're pleiotropic, pleomani. Tropic function. They're doing many functions. And I would say that the top three of what plants are doing because of what they contain is they're helping with inflammation, they're helping with Insulin and other hormones, and they're helping our cells to deal with stress. So I made this, this table here of the many different things that plants are doing. Yes, those are the, like, the top three things, but there are a number of things that they're doing actually. You know, certain plant compounds. When we eat plants, those compounds travel to certain parts of the body, and then they have a function. So, for example, when we eat something like kale. Kale and spinach, and even things like just any kind of green, leafy vegetable or basil or cilantro has lutein in it. Lutein is found in the macula in the eye. And so there's a reason why it's there. It's to help us, to protect us from things like blue light exposure. Right. To preserve the eye. We also know that many of these phytochemicals play a role in helping the cell to communicate better. So, for example, cinnamon, we know is an insulin sensitizer. Green tea catechins, we know are important for things like helping to support healthy body weight. And a lot of these plant compounds are important for the gut microbiome. They help with DNA repair and even epigenetics. You probably have heard a bit about that. So how do you know if you're eating enough plants? Many people have what's referred to as the phytonutrient gap, meaning they're not getting that full quantity of color. They may also be in a rut where they're eating the same colors over and over. In general, the evidence suggests that having fruit and vegetable intake can reduce the risk of chronic diseases. And the goal would be to aim for five servings per day, Right? Just five servings per day. When people were surveyed some time ago, what they found was that most people were falling short in purple, blue compounds. I want you to think right now for yourself. Think about your breakfast. Think about the colors that it had. Were you missing a color? If you think of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, brown, tan, what colors were you missing in your breakfast? Right. And as you move through your day, are you getting the other colors? That's really important. The problem a little bit is that we don't know about the exact phytochemicals that we're eating. Because if we look at a label on a product or we're picking up something in the produce section, we don't actually know what levels of phytochemicals. Right. We can look at the fiber content, and we're starting to learn a little bit more about the different phytochemicals as they're listed in the nutrient database. But typically we don't really see that on food labels, so it's hard to know what we're getting. All right, this is the big family tree of phytochemicals. And I think that this is some good information and will help you to navigate foods and phytochemicals a little bit more. So this is like a family tree of phytochemicals. Remember how I said that we take in something like 10 to 25,000 plant compounds? And those compounds aren't necessarily vitamins or minerals. They are separate compounds. What we see is that there is. I want you to pay attention to this category all the way to the left, because if you're ever on social media or you're listening to different media alerts and press releases, what we're finding out is more about phenolics, phenolic acids, the flavonoids, how important these things are for the gut and the brain. The other ones that you might want to be looking at is alkaloids, which are in coffee, if you like coffee. Coffee is chock full of different phytochemicals, actually nitrates, which are in green, leafy vegetables, sulfur compounds, we think of with the brassica vegetables, the cruciferous vegetable family, phytosterols. There's a whole bunch of different ones there. And the carotenoid family, which I've already mentioned, like beta carotene, alpha carotene. I'm going to talk about those again. But actually there are 700 different carotenoids. We don't see them all here and we don't see all of the other compounds either. But this is just kind of the lay of the land in terms of the different phytochemicals. So you know how we have the glycemic index and then people started to become aware of their glycemic intake and how if you have a high glycemic index, that typically means that the food would lead to a huge spike in blood sugar. Well, now we have a dietary phytochemical index, and ideally we want our phytochemical index to be high. We want more phytochemicals when that phytochemical index is higher. The research shows better body mass index, better waist circumference, better waist to hip ratio, and better levels of antioxidants and reduced oxidative stress. So eventually we'll have an app or some way that we can look at the quick, I would say the, the cumulative summary of our phytochemical index from our day of eating. The other thing that I know, Michael knows from what I talked about yesterday, is that it's really important that we diversify. And in the literature, there's a lot about the dietary diversity score, looking at people's diets and scoring them based on how diverse they are. If you look at the ancestral diet, what you see is that it averaged at about 3,000 plant species. In our modern diet, there are about 400 plant species, but only about 100 are eaten as food. Think about yourself right now. When you go to the grocery store or you go to the farmer's market, count up and see if you can see how many plant species you actually expose yourself to in a week. I think for most people, most people like to get something on the order of 50 unique plants. Plants in a week. But it's something we have to keep top of mind. We have to say, okay, I have to make sure I'm not eating the same thing every day. Because when we eat diversely, we can have different health benefits. And this is just a short list, but better blood pressure, systolic blood pressure, especially better DNA health because we have less oxidative damage, even less risk of falls. And there's a whole body of literature here, it's even better mood, better immune health, better gut health. So make sure that you change things up. Get the color and change up the colors. And adding just one food or one spice has been shown to have significant physiological impact. So don't think that, oh, just adding a little bit of spice on my meal isn't really that important. It's very important. Adding spices to your meals actually helps your meals to taste better and gives you more nutrient density and increases your dietary diversity. I actually did this in a meal and I tried to make this like a game. So I have a Facebook group and often I'll do different programs and I'll say, okay, some time ago we did this where we tried to see how many diverse plants that we ate in a week. And One woman had 232, which is really good. I had like 120. So. But, well, you've got to think about it. You've got to be intentional about it. And one of the ways that I was able to get 31 unique plants in one meal was because I loaded up my plate with spices. So my curry powder has 11 spices in it. Right? So right there, that's 11. So it's not so much about the amount. Focus on the quality and the diversity. I think in nutrition, people have been taught to look at serving sizes, focus on the amount, focus on the calories. This is kind of old school nutrition. What we need to look at is the amount is one thing to consider, but it is not the only thing we need to look at the diversification of our eating, the personalization of our eating, and even when we eat is very important. So lots of different publications on dietary diversity and people that eat more diverse diets tend to be more nutritionally complete or have a better nutritional status. And we know that there's a connection to the gut microbiome. So a healthy gut microbiome is one that comes from a diverse diet. So what you want in your gut is if you imagine like your gut, like a terrain, right? We have a gut terrain. We have this earth within us, metaphorically speaking. Well, how do you create a healthy garden? You want a polyculture, you want different plants that can help the other plants, right? Same thing with the gut. The gut needs diversity. So here looking at gut microbiome diversity in food, the more diverse the diet, the better the gut microbiome will be to changes. Right? So look at the title of the article that's cited here. A healthy gastrointestinal microbiome is, is dependent on dietary diversity. It's dependent on it. So for those of you who have poor gut health, are you in a food rut? Are you eating the same stuff day after day? You know, usually people cycle between something like five to seven different recipes in a week. I would say change it up. If you like stir fries, change up what's in that stir fry, get one new vegetable for the week, or bring in a soup where you can change up what's in that soup, add in different spices than you normally get, maybe gift yourself to a different spice because, you know, check out your spice rack. Many people have crusty old spices in their spice rack. I gotta say, because I have done home visits before where I go and check out people's kitchen and look at their foods and how is the food stacked in the refrigerator? Where do you have things? How do you eat, eat? The thing that I find over and over again is people do not replenish their spices. They don't pay attention to the expiration dates, and they tend to put their spices close to the oven, which is not a good idea. The stove top is too hot and too much heat, and then you start to lose the potency of spices. Spices need to be kept in the dark and in a cool space like in the cabinet. Some people have those nice drawers in their kitchen where they pull out the spices. That would be a good way to do it. So when it comes to your gut, I want you to think of the three Ps, right? If we look on the left, prebiotic fibers, we need fiber. I can't stress this enough. And we need all kinds of fibers. We need the mop kind, we need the broom kind, the kind that kind of soak up water and kind of hold things and kind of allow for the slow release of. Of sugar into the body. And then we need the kind that act like a broom and just sweep away things. Right. Or bind toxins. So make sure you're getting food sources of prebiotic fibers and get diverse ones. I'm just showing a little list here, but think of the supplemental ones, too, like apple fiber, psyllium, flaxseed meal. I just posted a study on my Facebook page that was about looking at flaxseed meal in people with fatty liver and how it was important for helping with health status. So you can look at that if you want the details. In the middle. We look at probiotics. So all the different fermented foods that naturally have different compositions of microorganisms, whatever you can do there. Some people can't do dairy, some people can't do soy. Some people actually have an issue with fermented foods because they may have gut overgrowth. Right. Where they have a lot of microorganisms. It's not a very healthy gut. And so if they have fermented foods, sometimes it. It does sit well for. Is that lost there? Yeah. Dr. Meg, just start your video again. There you go. Okay. Sorry about that. I don't know what happened. So some people ask me, how many diverse species do you we need to have? Well, there is a. A research project. It's a citizen science microbiome research project. It's called American Gut. You can actually just Google it, go online, and you can read more about it. One of their findings was that people that eat more than 30 plant types versus those that have less than 10 have better short chain fatty acid fermentation. Now you're thinking, well, is that a good thing? That is a good thing. You want short chain fatty acids in your gut. You want the butyrate, right? You want these things that help to signal a better immune system, a better gut health, better brain health, all from eating a diverse diet. So do a contest. You know, this is a fun thing to do at home, is just track the diverse things that you're eating through the week. There is some research to suggest that you will help your immune system by having food diversity. You help to decrease food allergy. And also for children, when they are started on a diverse diet earlier in life, they have less risk for developing allergic or autoimmune disease later in life. So there are lots of health benefits. I bet this is kind of an aha for some of you, right? In terms of just their latest science on dietary diversity. So this is a summary of the benefits. So, number one, better gut microbiome adaptability. Who doesn't want a better gut? Right? Also, there was a, a study looking at when the gut microbiome is more diverse. That's associated with less arterial stiffness in women. So that's a cardiovascular relationship. Improved nutritional and antioxidant status. It's protective against cardiometabolic dysfunction, especially high systolic blood pressure, lower risk for metabolic syndrome, less mental health issues such as anxiety and even depression. Better cognitive function, very important, right? Who doesn't want better memory, better capacity to learn, less allergic diseases, better visual and auditory sustained attention? So many people are struggling to stay focused, right? So again, diversity potentially can be important for that. Less risk for impaired function and risk for fractures. And it's important for bone health too. So I think you get the drift of where I'm going here with dietary diversity. Lots of research to support this. This is an interesting study. Let me just kind of showcase this quickly. So some people will say, well, is it diversity or do I just need to have my 8 to 10 servings of fruits and veggies? Well, as it turns out, it's not just having the number of servings, it's having diversity within those servings. This study in women that they had two groups of women, they were both given eight to ten servings of vegetables and fruits per day. But in one of the groups, they had more diversity than the other. And what they found was that the group of women that were given the more diverse diet actually had a better reduction in DNA oxidation, which is an important feature. Right? We don't want our DNA to be damaged. And having the more diverse diet actually help to protect the DNA. So I have different ways. Here's one of the tools I mentioned to you. I want to make this easier for you. So if you see this QR code up in the far right, what you do is you put your camera on it, you can hover over it, and then you'll get a link. And through that link, you can download my variety tracker that I Created. I kind of give you the instructions for it. And. And I based it on the one you see on the left, which was. I. I found this article that was published. Who is this? This person is now a colleague of mine, Miguel Toribio Mateus. And he Talked about the 50 foods that you should track. And what I did is I took that and then I put it into categories. So you see here? Vegetables, fruit. This is so you can keep it all straight. Right. So if I had a banana today, I would write down banana under fruit. But then tomorrow, if I'm doing this for seven days, right. Then if I have a banana tomorrow, I can't put it on this list because it's redundant. I've already had it. It's not diverse. But let me give you an example. If you have apples, and let's just say you go to the store and instead of buying a bag of Granny Smith apples, you buy one Red Delicious apple, one Fuji apple, one Pink lady apple. So you get three diverse apples. You can list those three apples on here under fruit. But if you ate three Red Delicious apples, that doesn't count because it's the same variety. So you can kind of see how this works. Right. I'd have to be analysis paralysis. It should be fun, inspiring, and very soulful and creative. All right. I think I. All right. Also, one thing I always get questions about is about children. And this is a great activity that you can also do with kids. When kids are presented with more variety, they actually will have more intake of vegetables. So this was a study in which they had presented kids with either a single vegetable or three different vegetables. Right. And what you see in both conditions is that the total amount of vegetables were greater in both situations because there was variety. So keep that in mind. If you want kids to eat more vegetables, they need options. They get inspired through variety. It's just human nature. Right. We like things to be different, and we usually. That's why in health, many people are looking at, well, like, what's new? What's the latest? Because we like variety. So, you know, during the pandemic, I was taking pictures of my lunches and my meals. This is my favorite blue plate. And I was just showing people, like, some of the different things that you could do with bringing in colorful foods and diverse foods. So I would say to try that on your own. Okay. So this is just something, you know, with different colors of food, there are different phytonutrients. I'm going to kind of move past this a little bit because I'm going to come back to that when I go through each of the colors. The colors of food are also associated with antioxidant level. So if you're having more antioxidants, you are going to be protecting the body, protecting the cell, protecting potentially the, the DNA. And even though I want you to eat the whole spectrum of colors, there was this one study that showed that red, blue and purple foods were shown to be the highest in total antioxidant capacity. Keep in mind that most people are not eating that blue, purple color of food. They're getting red, but not blue, purple. So to keep that in mind that you're missing out on some pretty potent antioxidants and high amounts of antioxidants when you forego those colors. Well, I do think that we need to think about the different colors of food, the different phytochemicals and the code, the our human code to those colors. And I'll show you what I mean because I'm going to take you through each color and every color connects to a function in the body. And that's what I'm going to talk about here in the eat by color approach, which actually again, I do talk about in my rainbow diet book. I go through each of the colors, I give you a list of the different foods and then I go through the recipes for each of those colors. All right, so I published a scientific article to establish the connection between the colors and the different impacts that it's having in the body. So red foods typically means that those foods are going to be helpful for the immune system and to help with inflammation. Orange foods typically we're seeing are helpful for protecting things like our hormones, our adipose tissue, our, our hormone, just our reproductive health overall. Yellow foods helping us with acids and enzymes to help with that digestive fire. Green foods for cardiovascular health to help help open up the blood vessels, the vasculature, to give us the folate, to give us the magnesium we need for circulation, and then blue, purple for brain health. ANDY and that is the rainbow diet color code that I talk about in the book. I also bring in other colors in the book, though. I do talk about tan, I talk about brown, and I talk about black and I talk about white. So I do bring in some of the other colors. But for today, I'm just going to go through some of these colors that are just top line. So right now in the chat, I'd love for you to write in your favorite color today if you think about all the colors, especially the colors of a Rainbow. Natural colors. What color is really speaking to you today? Why don't you write that in the chat? And it might change. For some of you, you've always had the same favorite color. Others of you are just, okay, you're gonna wear a certain color on a certain day. Kind of gives you a certain feeling. You know, color is psychological, and it is also. It has some healing. Right? So I'm just going to take a peek at the chat just to see what people are writing. Green, Green. Blue. Blue. Purple. Yellow. Orange. Good. Turquoise. All right. Yellow. Blue. Fabulous. Usually when I survey audiences, the most popular colors are blue and purple. And then I'm in the green camp. I love green. Some people like red a lot, but it's not often that you see people, you know, some of the other colors, not as much. My niece, it was really funny when she was first born. I wanted to have my ask her when she was finally able to talk what her favorite color was. And she kept saying, purple. Purple, Sam.