Tanya Borowski works privately with clients from her clinic on Harley Street, specializing in a functional medicine approach to health care. She works mainly in the area of digestive and gluten related issues, immune and auto-immunity, thyroid health - being 1 of only a handful of practitioners in the UK to have undergone postgraduate training with Dr Datis Kharrizan, the leading integrative Dr in this area, and fatigue syndromes such as CFS.
"Food is more than nutrition. The phytonutrients (phyto meaning plant) in plants literally communicate with cells and can influence our genetic predisposition – for the infinite better…… if we eat the right foods! So consider these 6 steps o getting more phytonutrients"
1 Aim for 9-13 Servings of Plant Foods Everyday
We need about 9-13 servings of whole plant foods if we want to prevent chronic disease. A typical serving is only half a cup of cooked vegetables, one cup of raw leafy vegetable, or a medium-sized piece of fruit. It would be best to aim for every meal of the day to have about 3-4 servings of plant foods.
2 Know Your Phytonutrient Sources
Phytonutrient-rich eats are limitless, making it fun to experiment with new varieties and colours even within one category of food. Here are some sources of phytonutrients to get you started: any and all plant foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and even herbs and spices.
3 Eat the Rainbow of Colors
Instead of getting the full rainbow of colour, you may be eating the standard processed food colours of brown, yellow and white. For example, think of the typical breakfast menu – toast, pancakes, ready-to-eat cereal, sausage, and eggs – which does not necessarily provide much colour early in the day. However, if you had a smoothie with blueberries, kale, and raspberries, you’d have three colours of the seven colours of the rainbow first thing in the morning! Make it your goal to get the full seven colours every day with a variety of foods.
4 Vary Your Choices
There are thousands of phytonutrients in nature. If we eat the same foods over and over again, even if they are colourful, we may be missing the universe of important phytonutrients in foods. One helpful hint is to try a new food every week to ensure that you are getting different foods to try!
5 Maximize Combinations
When we put certain foods together, we may achieve a better effect than if we just had the foods by themselves. Sometimes, there can be a “synergistic” result from combining certain foods. For example, eating avocado with carrot enhances the absorption of the beat carotene from the carrot and turmeric with black pepper together with olive oil could enhance the phytonutrient effects of all three foods on your health. Adding lemon juice to spinach could help the iron become more absorbed by your body due to the vitamin C content in the lemon. Try putting plant foods together for an enhanced health benefit
6 Be Creative with Substitutions
One way to get more plant foods would be to think of foods that are commonly eaten that may not be as nutrient dense and replace with nutrient-dense options. Some plant foods clearly give us more phytonutrients than others!
For example, you could substitute mashed white potatoes with sweet potatoes or half and half on a shepherds pie or . You could substitute white rice with purple, brown, or black rice.
