Nutrient-Rich World’s Healthiest Foods Key to Healthy Weight Loss

Why Health and Healthy Weight Becomes Challenged When You Don’t Get Enough Nutrient-Rich World’s Healthiest Foods 

The modern American diet is often criticized as being a diet that is prone to excess. Too many fats, too many sweets, too much-fried food, too much salt, too much meat, and too many calories! Many health analysts think about obesity in precisely this way—as a problem resulting from excess and overconsumption.

Yet the opposite side of the equation when it comes to health and maintaining a healthy weight—the team involving underconsumption and nutrient deficiency—is equally right. The American diet is just as much one of scarcity and undernourishment. The average U.S. adult consumes a daily food that fails to provide 100% of the Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) level for: 

It also offers less than 50% of the DRI for:

What happens when we get this low in our nutrient intake? If it’s only for a few days, usually nothing. When we are healthy, our bodies have nutrient reserves that they can draw upon to meet our nutritional needs. But if we are low in nutrients week after week, month after month, this nutrient deficiency can start us off on the road to chronic disease and

Unhealthy weight gain. Developing a severe illness as a result of nutrient deficiency is not a quick or immediately visible process. In the past, we have tended to think about nutrient deficiency conditions as involving the total absence of a single nutrient and relatively rapid appearance of unusual symptoms. The disease called scurvy that gets triggered by vitamin C deficiency is a good example. This condition, which is readily visible in the form of damage to gums of the mouth, was seen initially in sailors in the middle of long voyages without the benefit of fruits and vegetables on board. In this situation, there is a reasonably fast-developing and direct relationship between a single nutrient deficiency (vitamin C) and a very unique set of symptoms (damage to the gums). 

Today’s nutrient deficiency diseases do not fit into this scurvy type of pattern. Today, it is not one single nutrient that has fallen below the recommended intake level. It is more like a dozen nutrients as we consume all of them in amounts that fall far below the prices we need. Over a period of time involving several years, we may still not see any visible signs of disease related to these nutrient deficiencies. Instead, we may only feel like we’re tired more often than we should be. Or that we don’t sleep as soundly as we should, or don’t feel well rested upon waking. Or that we are fatigued and can’t concentrate well. Our chronic nutrient deficiency is definitely leading us in the direction of more serious health problems, even though we may have yet to see any visible evidence of these problems. 

Underneath the surface, at a cellular level, long-term nutrient deficiency changes the way our body functions. Virtually all body functions require unique combinations of nutrients. We cannot keep our cell membranes intact without the help of vitamin E. We cannot protect the structures inside the cell from oxygen-related damage without the help of copper, zinc, and selenium. Inside the energy-producing mitochondria in our cells, manganese is essential. Our muscles cannot use carbohydrates for fuel without a specific mixture of B-complex vitamins. Chronic nutrient deficiency disrupts all of these processes. They don’t altogether cease, but instead continue to operate in a

sub-optimal way. Over time, what starts out as sub-optimal progresses onward to entirely problematic. 

Being overweight as well as virtually all chronic diseases have the nutrient deficiency as a well-researched contributing factor. (Also, many commonly-eaten, processed foods that can place us at higher risk of chronic disease can also put us at higher risk for obesity.) With cardiovascular disease, these nutrient deficiencies clearly involve vitamins B6, B12, and folate. With diabetes, the role of nutrient deficiency is not yet as clear as it is in the case of cardiovascular disease, but at least in animal studies, biotin, magnesium, vitamin E, coenzyme Q, and lipoic acid have all been implicated as nutrients that may contribute to disease risk when chronically deficient in the body. A long list of anti-inflammatory nutrients— including the flavonoids and carotenoids found in most fresh fruits and vegetables—is becoming a particular area of focus when it comes to nutrient deficiency and chronic disease. Lack of these anti-inflammatory nutrients may be especially important because so many chronic diseases and obesity appear to have an inflammatory component.

As you can see, the connection between nutrient deficiency and chronic disease is not a fast, simple, or readily apparent one. But the takeaway message here is definitely simple and readily apparent: we need to do everything we can to avoid nutrient deficiency in our meal plans if we want to minimize our risk of chronic disease and obesity. 

That’s where the World’s Healthiest Foods come in. They provide you with all of the nutrients you need for health. And with the Healthy Weight Loss Eating Plan, you’ll see how easy it is to eat a variety of these foods to make delicious meals while getting all of the nutrients you need for health and keep you from becoming nutrient-deficient or malnourished.

 In the next chapter, we’ll take this topic of nutrients and health one step further. We’ll look very specifically at why they are so crucial to healthy weight loss and good health