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Eat! The World’s Most Nutritious Foods
According to…
No single food — not even a superfood — can offer all the nutrition, health benefits, and energy we need to nourish ourselves. Katherine D. McManus, 2018
Uh, so apparently a “balanced diet” is still one of the rules. Got it?
Still, the world of nutrition is complicated. But should it be? We’re supposed to “eat three squares a day” and actually know what that means. I’ve written about Michael Pollan’s eating rule and it’s certainly simple. Basically, he says eat less food, eat mostly plants.
I stumbled across a list of the 100 most nutritious foods not too long ago, and it got me thinking. I wanted to know more. Days later, I could not find that specific list on a search engine. What I did find were many lists of superfoods, best foods for this or that problem, most nutrient-dense foods. You get my drift.
These lists were designed through a variety of methodologies, most of them obscure to the reader. The foods were imbued with predictable life-saving qualities:
Reduce cancer risks
Reduce heart disease
Reduce diabetes,
Lower blood pressure
Prevent dementia
Improve eye health, and so on.
Best foods ever — here we go
I know you want me to get on with it and spill the beans. Pun intended.
I synthesized five lists using an Excel spreadsheet. The nutritional requirements for the list-makers cited further below varied. The BBC’s top 100 list provided nutritional scores, calories, and cost, but there’s no information about how the final scores were derived. For each of this article’s sources, there is a focus — heart health, balanced clean eating, and so on.
I will begin listing the foods most often identified and end with a few foods referred to as either nutrient-dense, required eating, or “nearly nutritionally perfect.”
But first, let me tell you what is NOT on the lists — Beef. Poultry. Dairy. Sugar.
