Has good sense finally returned to the topic of healthy eating?
Such a proposition is almost too exciting to hope for, yet it has been laid before us in the form of the new Nourishment Table, a nuanced visual guide to choosing the healthiest foods.
Just launched by an international collaboration of academics and food scientists, it is a real breath of fresh air. This refreshing model leaves the UK Eatwell Guide and the US Healthy Eating Pyramid looking as relevant as yesterday’s discarded sweetie wrappers.
It shuns simplistic predecessors that divide major food groups into one-size-fits-all ‘good’ elements, like starchy carbs, and ‘bad’, like red meat, irrespective of their production method.
The Nourishment Table restores balance to nutrition debates by applying two principles.
Firstly, the table encourages us to choose the most nutrient-dense foods, those that are richest in essential macro and micro-nutrients, such as meat, eggs, dairy, oily fish and leafy greens.
Secondly, it asks us to consider how much our food has been processed. It welcomes the inclusion in our diets of minimally or moderately processed food, but the minimisation of these same foods in their ultra-processed forms.
Light processing can boost nutrient bioavailability and digestibility, and usefully extend shelf-life. However, ultra-processing destroys the food ‘matrix’, depletes its nutrients, and replaces them with additive hi-tech industrial ingredients that have inadequately studied health impacts.
Follow the Nourishment Table, and you will eat a diet of medium to high-nutrient-dense foods that are only minimally or moderately processed, such as natural yoghurt.
The table also enshrines the body of scientific research that shows an excessively plant-based diet, such as the Eat-Lancet Planetary Diet, can cause nutrient deficiencies and, in some contexts, even malnutrition and stunting.
Instead it sensibly recommends that 25%-30% of total calories, or at least half of our protein intake, should come from animal sources, alongside plant-based staples, fruits, and vegetables.
We’ve wasted too much time pursuing unproductive, binary debates that pit ‘plant’ against ‘animal’. The Nourishment Table shows a sensible way forward. Let’s hope the public health establishment doesn’t double down on decades of bankrupt advice, but is open and intelligent enough to listen.
Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of Swallow This
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