So, Why Eating Colorful Food Is good for our health? Eating all the colors of the rainbow can help improve brain health and reduce your risk of heart disease.
Most of us face the same choice several times a day: what to eat. In addition to price, availability, and preference, we often use the healthiness of food to help us make decisions.
But if we narrow it down to review our overall diet, how do we know we’re getting the nutrients we need?
Researchers generally recognize that we need a varied diet, and one way to do that is to eat all the colors of the rainbow. But is color the best guide to getting all the nutrients we need?
Evidence for this may lie in the Mediterranean diet, often scientists rank it as the healthiest diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats such as extra virgin olive oil.
It’s no coincidence that the diet is full of different colors.
In fact, the colors are no different from other plant-based diets, such as vegetarians. There are other reasons why the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest. Mediterranean residents traditionally boil vegetables instead of frying them, which preserves nutrients.
But a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can’t be ignored either. The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables for our brain and heart are one of the most enduring discoveries in nutritional science.
Eating a lot of colors reduces the risk of missing out on all important nutrients. That’s because plant foods contain thousands of natural compounds called phytonutrients, including carotenoids and flavonoids that have anti-inflammatory properties. And different colored plants have different benefits.
Blue and purple foods, including blueberries, are rich in the plant pigment anthocyanins, which have been linked to a lower risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Flavonoids give foods their yellow color and may reduce the risk of heart disease.
Some studies suggest that flavonoids may improve brain health by blocking brain neurotoxicity associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
After tracking the diets of 50,000 people for more than 20 years, they found that those who ate more flavonoid-rich foods, including oranges, peppers, celery, and grapefruit, had lower levels of cognitive decline and dementia.
Eating a colorful diet can also help people avoid the potential adverse effects of eating too much of one food.
But eating a rainbow diet can also be difficult.
However, Minich believes that the rainbow diet is not into limit to fruits and vegetables, but also includes other whole foods such as herbs, spices, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and even tea. Also, those white foods are part of the rainbow diet, including tofu, which contains many different isoflavones that liaison to a lower risk of heart disease and certain cancers, as well as cognitive decline.
Eating multiple colors may mean we eat more fruits and vegetables overall. Promoting people to eat colorful meals increases their consumption of healthy foods,
But a more colorful diet can also increase your risk of eating unhealthy foods. Embling found that we were more likely to eat more pizza when the pizza had many toppings of different colors. Eating fruits and vegetables of different colors but choosing foods with a smaller range of colors for more pleasing foods. It is also worth noting that artificial colors in food, such as cake and sweets, sadly don’t count towards a varied healthy diet.
In other words, they can be healthier than the sum of their parts.
“The color of food is very important to our diet, but the taste is very good, especially those that taste bitter like arugula, kale, celery, and green tea,” said Minic, who was not involved in the study but agreed with his The research results and highlights the benefits of these compounds interacting with each other to further promote our health.
