Eat Your Vegetables

(Image via: skulladay.com)

The foundational triad upon which modern nutrition rests is the separation of food into three basic components called carbohydrates, proteins and fats. These are known as the macronutrients, the articles in our diet that supply us with food energy or ‘calories’, as opposed to the other category of micronutrients <read more> that do not. Although not specifically implied, this unfortunate division has led people to think that the macronutrients are more important, more vital to get through the day, giving us the energy we need to get things done. But based on my experience with patients, and in the health of my family and friends, my feeling is that this tripod upon which modern nutrition rests is a little shaky, and doesn’t fully account for what people really need to know about their diet. What I tell my patients is that along side carbs, proteins and fats there is a fourth leg to this equation, forming a solid earthy square upon which our concept of nutrition can be solidly built. Yes it is true that this food may not give you much energy, but as I aim to illustrate, it does have a number of vitally important functions. It is the very food that your mother harped on at you about eating. In Latin it is derived from the word ‘vegere’, which literally means ‘to live’, and so I know it is more than just my bias as a herbalist and a fondness of green things when I say that the most important foods are your vegetables.

Although most of us are familiar with a few different types of vegetables (for some, as instruments of torture), the word ‘vegetable’ in fact relates to the entire plant kingdom, a surprisingly large number of which are completely edible. Where I am living now in Vancouver, the local Salishan peoples chose from hundreds of different local plants as food, including roots and tubers like springbank clover and kamchatka lily, the young green shoots of salmonberry and fireweed, the inner bark of western hemlock, wild berries such as huckleberry and soapberry, and a variety of different seaweeds and lichens. But when I look at what most of us conventionally call ‘vegetables’, such as the ones found in your local grocery store, the diversity is very limited in comparison, often only to those that have been bred to survive the infrastructure of Big Food, such as peas, potatoes and carrots.

As we probe the subject of vegetation, one thing that should be dispelled at the outset is this confusion between a fruit and a vegetable. A fruit is the reproductive part of a plant, whereas a vegetable is the part of the plant that ‘vegetates’, or grows. There is no essential difference between them, except in what part of the plant they come from, and hence, a zucchini or green bean is as much a fruit as is an apple or mango. What public policy experts have done however by admonishing us to eat plenty of “fruits and vegetables” is create a mindset that says that the very sweetest spectrum of vegetation should be given equal if not leading preference to the huge diversity of non-sweet vegetation that we could choose instead. Given that many of the fruits we eat nowadays have been selectively hybridized for traits such as sweetness and a lack of fiber (e.g. bananas, seedless grapes), this unfortunate policy essentially advocates for increased sugar intake through excess fruit consumption, contributing to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes that now affects the entire world. What the dietary experts should have told us was to eat plenty of vegetation in all shapes, sizes and colours, but only a little bit of the sweet ones.

In my practice I make a general separation between what I call starchy and non-starchy vegetables, the former including starchy roots and tubers such as potatoes, taro and cassava, which I tend to lump in with carbohydrates. The biosynthesis of starch in the root or tuber of a plant serves a vitally important function, allowing it to store the energy it has gathered through photosynthesis – but there are naturally ‘wild’ limitations on this. Just as we have done with the sweet fruits, we have cleverly found a way to bypass these natural limits through genetic selection and hybridization, dramatically increasing traits such as starchiness. For example, the pinky-orange flesh of the modern carrot bears little resemblance to the ancestral carrot, Daucus carota, which produces a small bitter-tasting root with rather more medicinal than food-like properties. And yet as bizarre as it may seem to us, very few of the roots and tubers we eat nowadays bear any resemblance to their wild predecessors, which our ancestors began to cultivate a few thousand years ago. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of. In preference to eating only very starchy roots and tubers such as the potato, and especially in folks trying to maintain a healthy blood sugar, I emphasize colourful, fiber-rich, lower-starch options including burdock, beets, turnips, rutabaga, daikon, radish, sweet potato, onion, garlic, ginger and turmeric. Fortified with a diverse array of immune-boosting nutrients, these types of roots and tubers including their peels contain an abundance of fiber that not only slows down the absorption of carbohydrates, naturally regulating blood sugar, but helps to establish and maintain a healthy bacterial ecology in your gut, alleviating problems such as constipation.

Non-starchy vegetables are those which contain relatively little starch and are typically rich in an abundant array of vitamins and minerals, as well as phyonutrients <read more>, a class of compounds in plants that have a diverse array of functions in your body, everything from regulating metabolism and preventing cancer, to stabilizing blood sugar and dispelling inflammation. If we can for a moment contemplate the unity of all living things, it is easy to see that just as the flower of a plant corresponds to our sexual organs, the vegetative part of a plant is biologically analogous to our own bodies. Fresh vegetables represent the very essence of living energy on earth, and unlike dried nuts, seeds, grains and meat, are closest to life itself, to the soil of creation and the memory of growth and living. Eating fresh vegetables isn’t just good for you, it is crucial to remind your body of how to live in the full expression of life. Like roots and tubers, your non-starchy vegetables should ideally be as diverse as possible, expressing a rainbow of colors, each of which represents a distinct class of phytonutrients with uniquely beneficial properties.  My most common recommendations for non-starchy vegetables include leafy greens (e.g. cabbages, chard, kale, spinach, lettuce, radicchio, watercress, dandelion greens, beet greens, nettle), flowers (e.g. broccoli, artichokes, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, tiger lily, nasturtium), stems (e.g. celery, asparagus, leeks, rhubarb, fiddleheads), fruits (e.g. cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, squashes, gourds, tomatoes, avocado), seaweed (e.g. nori, wakame, hijiki, kombu, dulse, kelp, bladderwrack), sprouts (e.g. broccoli, onion, garlic, alfalfa, red clover, mug) and culinary herbs (e.g. basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, mint, bay leaf, curry leaf, fenugreek leaf).

Among all the different foods, vegetables are the most closely allied with medicinal plants. Some vegetables such as ginger and garlic straddle the definition between food and medicine, and can also be used to treat disease. Garlic for example has potent antimicrobial properties, and has been shown to normalize blood lipids in vascular disease. Similarly, ginger has been shown to treat nausea as well as reduce inflammation.  Whenever I am feeling like I am catching a cold, I will make a soup of sliced ginger and garlic, along with some green onions and a little tamari sauce as a garnish, to boost my immune system and overcome the virus. These same types of benefits are found in all vegetables – the only difference is dosage. Plants like basil, garlic and ginger exert their benefits in relatively small amounts, whereas vegetables such as broccoli or kale need to be consumed in liberal amounts to receive their benefits. As a general rule of thumb, I encourage all my patients to eat lots of vegetables, ideally, one half the volume of food they eat each day.  This means if you were to look at a dinner plate, at least half your plate would be filled with veggies. The net benefit of eating this way not only relates to an optimal intake of a broad array of healthful, antioxidant compounds, but because of all the plant fiber, leads to the satiation of appetite without consuming excess nutrients.  Note that salads, which aren’t very dense and before being chewed take up a lot of room on the plate relative to their actual weight, don’t count in this equation. Perhaps it is my influence of both Chinese and Indian medicine which states that raw vegetables are hard to digest, but I find that if my patients only eat salad as their primary source of vegetation, I usually fail to see the same benefits as I see in my patients that lightly steam, stir-fry or juice their vegetables. My thesis, supported by the fact that there is no culture on earth <read more> that exclusively eats a raw food vegetarian diet, is that we do not digest raw vegetation all that well. Unlike ruminants such as cows that do, we lack the enzyme cellulase required to break down the plant cell wall. And because very few people chew their food to a liquid-like consistency before swallowing, which if you are eating a “big salad” could take you as much as an hour, much of the salad we eat does not get digested and at best just feeds the gut bacteria.  So not bad, except not all that good either…

Although all vegetables are generally beneficial, the traditional systems of medicine including Ayurveda and Chinese medicine attributes different properties to each, and hence each type of vegetable has a unique property that can affect the body in different ways. Overall, most vegetables are cooling to the body, which is why they generally need to be cooked a little, to ‘warm’ them up, especially if the digestion is weak. Other vegetables are exceptionally warming or pungent in nature, and especially in people that suffer from excess heat or burning sensations, either need to be avoided or processed by cooking to modify their properties, such as ginger or onions. Dry, skinny and cold people will tend to do better by eating more sweet-tasting vegetables, such as roots and tubers, lightly stir-frying their greens and non-starchy veggies in a little fat like ghee or olive oil, along with herbs such as cumin, mustard seed, garlic and salt. For heavier-set folks with an excess of weight and sluggish circulation, starchy vegetables are generally avoided, and non-starchy vegetables such as leafy greens can be prepared without fat, such as steamed or in soups, adding in pungent, warming and stimulating herbs such as basil, oregano and ginger. For those folks that tend to suffer from an excess of heat and irritability, pungent vegetables such as garlic, mustard greens, peppers and tomatoes are generally avoided, giving preference to non-starchy vegetables prepared raw, juiced or lightly steamed, along with some starchy sweet vegetables like sweet potato and squash to keep them grounded and calm. Of course this doesn’t mean that just because you are a warm person you can’t ever eat tomatoes or garlic – it is just something to be aware of if you ever notice yourself getting too hot.  Happy summer hotties!

~ Todd Caldecott