The definition of a nutrient diet can vary a bit depending on who you talk to. Here is what I consider to be a good definition.
a food with high vitamin and mineral content relative to its caloric value is nutrient dense.
Less calories and the more vitamins and minerals a food has, the more nutrient dense. A good example of this is a dark leafy green or blueberries.
We really want to try to get in as many foods that are rich in V and M as possible in the best possible way. We need calories as they provide the energy for our body to do what it needs to do on a daily basis and we need a good diverse diet rather than focusing on just what v & m are in each food. That is important but it isn’t the only thing we need to consider.
We want to maximize nutrient content in our meals and we want to maximize flavor.
I have spoke about consuming a whole foods diet before and again, this is not the store, it is the kind of food we should prioritize daily. Whole foods are foods that are unprocessed with nothing added to it and nothing has been taken away. Wheat flour is an example of a food that has had something taken away. Whole wheat is processed to remove the outer layer or the germ. This is where all the vitamins and minerals are stored so when we consume white wheat flour, the vitamins have been stripped away and synthetic ones are added back in. It is not a nutrient dense food compared to whole wheat.
Obviously if you are here, you have thyroid issues so wheat isn’t something we are consuming anyway. At least most of us. Whole foods are found in the perimeter of your grocery store in the produce and meat departments. Dairy too if you do it but conventional dairy is not a great thing to consume either. Focus on veggies, fruits, beans, legumes, whole grains, lentils, eggs, animal dairy products, meats, organ meats, and fish. A combo of these daily adds up to a nutrient dense diet.
Not all of the whole foods at the store are equal in nutrient density. You can make a meal of a boneless, skinless chicken breast, white rice, iceberg lettuce with some basic veggies and a store bought basic salad dressing and you have a whole food based dinner but the nutrient density is not so great. It’s still better than a fast food meal but it could be made better by switching the chicken breast for a thigh and leg seasoned with some fresh herbs and you could do brown rice or black rice instead of white rice cooked in bone broth and topped with grass fed butter and make a salad dressing of olive oil and lemon or get a good quality salad dressing such as primal kitchen salad dressings.
How diverse is your diet?
This is super important because what we put in our mouth feeds our gut bacteria. We can begin a healthy diet with eating simple things like chicken, broccoli and rice but if that is all we ever eat, we will end up deficient in many vitamins and minerals. We need a variety of foods to build a healthy microbiome aka healthy gut and get a variety of micronutrients and plant nutrients or phytonutrients. Those fibers in plants feed all the various types of bacteria in your gut so the more of them you eat, the better off you are for building a strong and diverse and healthy microbiome.
Our needs change daily depending on how busy we are, the stress we have that day, and how active or inactive we are. We can’t anticipate what we need from day to day as far as micronutrients go so we have to provide our body with a wide variety of foods and let the body do its magic. Your body will tell you if it’s needing something through cravings but sometimes we are fooled about what we really need by sugar, caffeine, stress, and alcohol. Those 4 things will trick you into thinking you need something adjacent to what your body really is needing. If you are needing chromium, you might crave sweets. If you are needing phosphorus you might crave coffee, if you need protein you might crave alcohol. I’ll be honest, the last thing I want when I don’t eat enough protein is alcohol but you never know. My biggest cravings when lacking protein is just food in general.
Our ancestral brain is probably more familiar with eating seasonally as we come from hunter gatherers so we hunted, fished, foraged for what we needed. This, of course, varied based on where in the world our ancestors were. Now we live in a global economy and we can get pretty much anything we want at one grocery store, maybe a couple specialty stores. Most produce is picked and shipped before it is ripe and shipped across the country.
I live in Minnesota and we can’t grow citrus here, except indoors- I actually have a lemon tree that gives me about 7 lemons a year - we can grow apples, pears, squash and basic garden produce during the growing season from May to August. We are meat and potatoes people but my friend in Arizona has citrus trees on her property and she can harvest bushels of lemons. My daughter is in california where avocados are plentiful. You get the idea. Where we live matters in the type of foods readily available to us and having access to all these different foods is kind of cool. It provides even greater variety to what we might normally have access to.
Where does your food come from? If you live in a food desert, it’s coming from the convenience store maybe. If you can grow your own - ideal. I am lucky to know where 90% of what I eat comes from, especially in summer. I buy most of my meat local. I shop farmers markets in summer. There are some big issues with factory farmed meat and dairy products and monocrop farming is terrible for the top soil. The factory farming industry uses more antibiotics that the medical industry. That can’t be good for us, or our guts. Milk cows are separated from their calves so the milk can be used and sold.
The chemicals sprayed on crops is destroying the topsoil as I mentioned and killing off the bees. All the chemicals in our food, our body has to detoxify and get rid of. Not an easy feat when it is constantly bombarded. Monocrop farming also depletes nutrients in the soil which depletes nutrients in our food.
This is so very doom and gloom, I realize, but it is what we are faced with but the good news is that many of you have a choice in where you buy your food so shop with your dollars. Support those small local farmers when you can. It turns out, in todays economy, it might even be cheaper to buy local. I paid $4.50 per pound for grass fed beef last year. Not too bad.
Rather than spending a boat load of time binging your favorite show on whatever your streaming service of choice is, cook a nice meal and enjoy it with people you enjoy rather than plopping down in front of the television. Making a meal with love and some thought is nutritious, really good, and can even be healing to your body.
You don’t have to radically change your diet to start cooking more. Just start doing it. There are a million and one websites dedicated to cooking food and plenty of shows on tv or the internet to help you learn how to cook if you don’t know how. There used to be a show on the food network called How To Boil Water and my favorite cooking show of all time was called Cooking Live. I learned how to cook from that show in particular. It was the greatest. Anyway, you can learn how to cook something pretty easily now is the point.
Start by adding in some new recipe or a new veggie rather than cutting out all the crap you might be eating right now. Focus on the add and don’t judge yourself for what your current diet is. I think people think I judge them because of what they are eating because I’m a nutritionist. I don’t judge anyone. I don’t eat perfectly every day. No one does. But if you have a food sensitivity then you obviously need to remove some foods, and I do recommend thyroid patients avoid gluten to start with. Other than that, focus on getting in some good food and the bad stuff will eventually be edged out.
Eating real whole foods means your body can assimilate the nutrients better that those foods hold compared to synthetic nutrients often added to processed foods. Whole foods are mostly lower in calories than processed foods and you get more nutrient bang for your buck. The body knows how to use protein, carbs and fats from whole foods better than it does junk fats and it can get overwhelmed by our consumption of refined carbs and I don’t even want to talk about fake meat.
Some processed foods have their place. We can’t eat pasta without processing some kind of flour whether it is wheat or chickpea or rice flour. I like the occasional cracker which is processed. You get the idea. We are going to eat processed foods- they just should not make up the bulk of our diet.
We want to try to avoid those seed oils and hydrogenated oils and trans fats as much as possible. They are bad for us, they age us faster and they damage our cells.
A calorie is not a calorie. 100 calories of broccoli is vastly different than 100 calories of oreos. When you go from the standard american diet to a whole foods diet/lifestlye the food is more satiating so you end up eating less calories but feeling full and in the long run feeling better. Protein in particular is very filling and keeps you full for a long time. The general healthy recommendation for protein intake for women in particular is around 100grams per day or around 30 grams per meal. 30 grams of protein is about 1 4oz piece of chicken breast.
I don’t recommend focusing on calories in and calories out. Focus on eating some good food. Focus on protein at breakfast, lunch and dinner and just see how you feel. Pay attention to whether or not you have cravings anymore. Don’t restrict calories. Eat until you are slightly full and make sure you are chewing each bite of food really really well. By taking time to chew well before swallowing, you will be able to notice when you start to feel full. If you shove down half a frozen pizza in about 5 minutes, your brain doesn’t have time to catch up with your body and you find yourself feeling miserably stuffed.
Eating a diverse, nutrient dense diet not only makes sure we are eating enough food to sustain our energy but it also provides the building blocks and energy needed to make healthy tissue. Your thyroid is made up of tissue and if you are not building healthy tissue, you will not be building a healthy thyroid gland. See, there is a point to all this. Our body is constantly rebuilding bone, muscle, connective tissue and on and on. We must provide it with what it needs to do that.
Protein is great for making us feel full or satiated but fiber from plants and good healthy fats also help make us feel full for longer periods which keeps us from feeling the need to graze for energy at 2pm. Soluble fibers and certain fats can slow the emptying of the stomach. Fat in our food signals the release of a chemical from the body to help keep us full longer too. When we are full on these kinds of foods, we don’t over eat refined processed foods because we are full. We can’t physically do it. If you do, you are overeating and taking in too many calories which leads to fat gain.
Eating this way also improves your blood sugar regulation keeping you off the blood sugar roller coaster. You will snack less and improve your body’s ability to use insulin properly. Feel guilty about overindulging ever? Consuming adequate protein, carbs and fats from real whole foods will also stop the guilt of indulgence.
What is the point of this? Well, eating real whole, nutrient dense foods most of the time will help you avoid being deficient in nutrients, and helps you avoid a body with dis-ease. So we need our essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, and vitamins and minerals that we need to get from our diet to thrive and be well. These all are broken down by our digestive system into chemicals our body can use to build healthy cells, tissues, and organs. Our health is dependent on cells that can function properly. Our cells thrive when they are provided the proper nutrients. We really are only as healthy as our cells are.
What is your cell blueprint? If you want to learn more about where your cells are lacking, go to my website www.helpforhashimotos.com and click on the get help tab and then click on work with me to schedule a 15 minute call to see if we are a good fit. I’ll listen to your story, I’ll tell you how I operate my practice and you can decide if I’m someone you want to work with. No hard sales, no convincing you to put my package on your credit card. I only want to work with people who are ready to do the work it takes to get better. I’ll never try to convince you I can fix you and you must do it now.
Anyway, on to how we cook our food and how that affects nutrient density.
Different nutrients survive the cooking process where others do not. Vitamin C, for example, does not survive cooking. It is best when you can eat a C containing food in its raw state right after you picked it. It is water soluble so it is lost in the cooking process into whatever liquid you cooked it in. It is also destroyed by high heat.
The good news is that fruits and vegetables have many vitamins and minerals in them, not just one. Tomatoes have lycopene and C and while cooking destroys the C, it enhances lycopene. So the bottom line here is along with variety, eat both cooked and raw to make the most of the nutrients. Or you can just eat sun dried tomatoes which preserves the C and boots lycopene so it is a win win!
Start your whole foods diet by again, adding in some good foods rather than taking away stuff. Take a meal you know how to cook and add some extra stuff to it. Then take that meal the next week and try make each aspect of the meal in a different way with a few more ingredients. Take a Kevin’s brand meal for example. It is meat and a sauce packet. How about adding in some chopped veggies to the pan before you saute the meat up? I eat these meals all the time because they are quick and easy. You don’t have to think about them at all. I will buy pre chopped broccoli or if I am on a good week, I will have chopped some up myself. I add some good olive oil to the pan, saute the broccoli for a few minutes until it starts to turn bright green and then I add in the meat and brown that up for a few minutes with the broccoli and then add the sauce. If I have time or take the time I will add rice as a side dish. And if I’m honest it is usually white rice but I do venture into brown and even black rice when I’m in the mood for a complaint by my husband.
Remind yourself that cheap food comes at a health cost. It never will nourish you like real whole foods will. Cheap is easy for us as the consumer and for the manufacturer but it will always be less nutritious than homemade.
Next episode will talk about understanding food label terms like organic, bioengineered, cage free etc.