Look Again. There Is More Going On in Your Food

An Apple and Apple Juice Come From the Same Place. Same Deal?

An orange is famous for vitamin C. But an orange is much more than vitamin C. The same goes for an apple, berries, carrots, broccoli and other fruits and vegetables. They come in a food matrix made up of thousands of packages stacked together, each package of the food matrix made up of: fibre, vitamins, minerals and thousands of natural plant compounds packed together inside the food. Many of these compounds are critical ingredients in what fruits and vegetables do for our health. Some act as antioxidants. Others affect our cells, immune function and many key systems throughout the body. Together, they help amplify the impact of the essential nutrients delivered in the fruit that our bodies need. We call it: Eat the Rainbow? Eat different coloured fruits and vegetables each day because they bring different combinations of nutrients and natural plant compounds. And they only come packaged together inside the whole food.

Let's talk fibre:

 It is not just there to help you poop. Most of the different fibres travel all the way to your large intestine, where they feed trillions of health-focused bacteria living there. Yes, many of those bacteria are working for you. They use fibre and transform other plant compounds, producing substances that affect your gut, immune system, metabolism, heart, brain and other systems throughout your body. Scientists are blown away by all we are learning about how this enormous community of bacteria communicates with the brain and influences emotional well-being, mental health and body health. So the food matrix is not just packaging. It is part of what makes the nutrients and other critical compounds in fruits and vegetables so powerful in your body.

Now what happens when you squeeze the life-health-forces out of a fruit. Look at what you left behind:

Just juice-sugar that is then mixed with water. The fibre, mostly gone. The structure that held the fruit together, gone. The matrix has been stripped away, it is GONE. What you kept is mostly just sugar, companies call it fruit sugar (and add water), you have squeezed out most of the essential health-focused nutrients out of that much bigger package. That is an enormous difference. The apple delivers the whole matrix. The "juice" delivers sugar. So an apple is not a container for sugar with a little vitamin C thrown in. It is a whole food, built as a package, and a package your body needs for best health and best functioning.

Try it: Someone says, “Apple juice comes from apples, so it is basically the same thing.” What would you tell them now?   Question 2: How many apples have had the juice sugar squeezed out of them to produce an 8 oz of sugar drink?

Now Look Again at the Food Guide Plate

Go back and look closely at the vegetables and fruit on Canada's Food Guide plate. What do you see? It is not half a plate of carrots. Or broccoli. Or apples. There is a selection of vegetables and fruits in different colours. That is there for a reason. Different coloured plants deliver different combinations of critical vitamins, minerals and natural plant compounds. Eating a variety gives your body a much wider selection of them, delivered inside their whole-food matrix. Remember Eat the Rainbow? There it is, sitting right on the Food Guide plate. The Guide is not pointing you toward one perfect fruit or vegetable. It is showing you variety. Red. Green. Orange. Purple or blue. White or brown. The mix changes from day to day. That is exactly what we want. And look again. Those are whole fruits and vegetables. The orange is still an orange. The berries are berries. The broccoli looks like broccoli. Now you know why that matters too. The Food Guide is not simply telling us to hunt down vitamin C, fibre or antioxidants one at a time. Whole fruits and vegetables bring those critical nutrients and plant compounds together in a matrix that helps amplify their impact in our bodies. That colourful half of the plate is telling us much more than “eat your vegetables.” It is showing us how to build variety into what we eat regularly.

Try it: Count your colours today. How many different colours of whole fruits and vegetables have shown up so far? Tomorrow, see if the mix changes.

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