Getting your “Five-a-day?” Congratulations! But you’re probably still deficient.

September 18, 2012

Around the world, health professionals are unified in promoting the consumption of fruits and vegetables. In Canada, we optimistically suggest that everyone should be getting “ 5 to 10 a day “, while in the US (as well as the UK, Germany, and others), the slogan is simply “5 a Day”.

The problem is, “5 a Day” simply isn’t good enough anymore. It might have been in the 1950s, but in today’s world we would have to consume significantly more than that in order to be optimally healthy. In fact, I’m not sure that the majority of us can do it with food alone. And the reason for this is twofold: food today isn’t as nutritious, and our nutrient needs are far higher than they used to be.

Today’s food just doesn’t cut it.

Every so often, Health Canada tests fruits and vegetables in Canada and provides tables listing their nutrient content. When you see a product label indicating the percentage of Vitamin C, iron, calcium etc. per serving, those values are calculated by plugging the recipe into a computer program which uses the data supplied by Health Canada. (Individual companies are not sending their food to be independently tested by labs, so having this data is important.)

Last week I discovered an article from the Globe and Mail published on July 6, 2002, ( ten years ago! ) by Andre Picard comparing the nutritional values, as provided by Health Canada, of 25 different fruits and vegetables between 1951 and 1999. The following is a sampling of what they found:

Everywhere you see red, the nutritional value has gone down…and that’s a lot of red! As you can see, the levels of vitamins and minerals in all of the foods they looked at have almost universally deteriorated, a lot . Take potatoes, for example, since it’s probably the most consumed vegetable in North America. The amount of calcium has gone down by 27.5%; the amount of Vitamin C, iron, and riboflavin have each gone down over 50%, and the Vitamin A in potatoes is completely gone…there used to be Vitamin A in potatoes, and now there is none! For the 25 most popular fruits and vegetables that were examined, nutrient losses were similar.

To put this into perspective, back in 1951, a woman could get her full Recommended Daily Allowance of Vitamin A by consuming just 2 peaches . Today, she would need fifty-three (53) peaches! Or how about the fact that you would have to eat eight oranges today to get the same amount of Vitamin A in just one orange in 1951.

Canada’s situation is not unique. According to data in the US and the UK, similar losses have been tracked in their food supply as well.

The first question to be asked is: why is this happening?  The most obvious reason has to do with mass-farming practices on the one hand, and the degradation of nutrients during long-haul transportation on the other. Historically, food was sourced locally and farming involved regular crop rotation, allowing land to lie fallow, and other techniques to ensure that the soil remained healthy, and in turn, so would the crops that grew on them. Millions of dollars have been spent on increasing profits through modern technology: fertilizers and chemicals to put out higher crop yields which are more resistant to pests and droughts, and which look beautiful to the eye. Where is the money ensuring that nutrient value has not been shortchanged as a result? Call me a cynic, but I’m not surprised.

The second question to ask is: what is being done about this? The answer: nothing. The only thing more shocking to me than the sheer magnitude of the nutrient losses is the fact that public health officials have known about this problem for decades and they don’t seem to see it as a problem worth addressing. This problem is not even on the radar! At the very least I would have expected Dietitians of Canada to make some sort of stand on food quality in Canada, given that our discipline’s raison d’etre is to promote healthy living through good nutrition. How can you meet your nutrient needs through food if the food doesn’t contain the nutrients in the first place? I’ve never had one communication from them addressing this issue.

So why is there no public outcry? The answer is that, despite the drastic decreases to nutritional values, our food is still good enough, if we eat very carefully, to (barely) supply our RDAs.

RDAs: Recommended Dietary Allowances

And that’s the problem. The RDA’s are defined as “the average daily dietary intake of a nutrient that is sufficient to meet the requirement of nearly all (97-98%) healthy persons.” We label our foods with %Daily Values (determined by picking the highest RDA value across demographic groups for the nutrient). The recommendations in Canada’s Food Guide (and the US MyPlate) have been developed in order to meet RDA values.  We’ve convinced ourselves that if we meet our RDAs, we’re doing what is needed to keep ourselves healthy. But we’ve forgotten our history. What does “meet the requirement” mean?

The RDAs were originally developed during World War II in order to determine what minimal nutrient intake was necessary to keep our servicemen and women up and fighting during periods of rationing . As in, how much Vitamin C do you need to prevent scurvy? Or how much thiamin to prevent beriberi? Or the amount of Vitamin D needed to prevent rickets? We’re not talking about optimal nutrition here. These are the levels known as adequate to avoid overt nutritional deficiencies , but they in no way give us the amounts needed to prevent long-term chronic disease. As an analogy, it’s like asking what’s the minimum amount of air I can put in my tires to keep my car moving? Having anything less than the optimal amount of air yields more wear and tear on the car, reduces its efficiency, and shortens its life overall. Having less than optimal nutrition does exactly the same thing to your body.

As I pointed out earlier, in 1951 it was extremely easy to meet your RDAs. A couple pieces of fruit and a few vegetables, each of which was chock-full of a wide spectrum of nutrients, and you were there. In fact, you’d be taking in far more nutrition than simply meeting your RDA values. In 1951 it was easy to be optimally nourished with food alone.

The RDAs have been updated every decade, and most nutrient levels have only changed slightly over the past 50 years. Where the evidence has strongly indicated a role in disease prevention (eg. Calcium & osteoporosis, Vitamin D & cancer), recommendations have increased. Surprisingly, most of the other nutrient recommendations have gone down!

If the history isn’t convincing enough, the RDA book itself states “RDAs are neither minimal requirements nor necessarily optimal levels of intake. It is not possible at this time to establish optima.” It’s in black and white, yet somehow we refuse to recognize that there is a difference between minimal and optimal.

Optimal has changed

Modern society is worlds different from the 1950s. Stresses to our bodies are increasing constantly: not only the go-go-go of today’s lifestyles, but also things such as lack of sleep; air pollution; noise pollution; the chemicals and toxins that surround us in our foods, cleaning products, beauty products, paints, glues, light bulbs etc. The list goes on. All of this affects us. Even if we’re not eating it directly, we breathe it in, and it absorbs through our skin. Our bodies defend ourselves with our immune system, our liver, our digestive systems, our skin, our tear ducts, our nose hair and so on. Those only work and regenerate if they are properly nourished and hydrated. The more stress, the more work they have to do, and the greater our nutritional needs to keep at full fighting strength.

Bridging the gap

“We are living to short and dying too long” – Dr. Myron Wentz. As a society, we’ve become very good at taking care of infectious diseases. Immunizations, antibiotics and antivirals are amazing at keeping us free from the multitude of diseases that brought down our grandparents and great-grandparents. Now, however, we are seeing an unprecedented rise in chronic degenerative diseases. The diseases that rob you of life; that kill you slowly, over years or decades. Cancers, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and so on. These are diseases that start off with oxidative damage to individual cells. Damage that could potentially be prevented or reversed with proper nutrition: antioxidants, vitamins and minerals whose function it is to protect each and every cell in the body.

Can we prevent these diseases with food today? I don’t think so. Not the majority of us, anyway, who can’t seem to get even 5 fruits and vegetables in daily; and those five just barely keep us from becoming visibly deficient. Not with the amount of processed food in our diet, whose nutrients have been stripped away and replaced with fat, sugar, and salt.

The way I see it, we have two choices, and one imperative. We can overhaul our diets to eliminate the processed food, so we can maximize the nutrients that we can get from our diets. We can do the best we can, and take a high-quality nutritional supplement as insurance. (I’ve written a couple of blog posts on this subject previously to help choose a good product) And we must demand better from our public health professionals and ultimately the government to see that something is being done about this. The problem is not irreversible, we just need to take action.

I’d be very interested to hear your comments. Are you as shocked as I was? Do you see any other ways to solve this problem? (we can’t all grow veggie gardens in our back yards, sadly). What are your thoughts?

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