The Scientific Top 10 Of The Most Nutritious Vegetables And Fruits
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What fruits and vegetables really deliver nutrients? Scientists analyzed and came up with the top ten.
Eat Your Greens (And Reds And Yellows)
Countless the lists claiming to show you the “23 superfoods you need to know” (“Mr. Smith, this is Mr. Kale”), the “best 8 fruits for better health” and… well, you know the creativity of headline writers.
At other times they declare one food king of the crop (excuse the tired expression; I couldn’t resist its aptness), but it changes on a monthly basis. Today it’s broccoli, but before you are finished with the leftovers you learn you should have gone for cabbage all along.
None of that had any real scientific backing. Until now, when researchers from William Paterson University presented an approach with sound methodology.
The Top 10 Fruits And Vegetables
They took over 100 fruits and vegetables and analyzed their content of 17 nutrients, from protein over minerals to vitamins. Then they ranked them according to nutrient content per 100 kcal with a maximum score of 100 points.
Out came this list:
- Collard green (62.49)
- Romaine lettuce (63.48)
- Parsley (65.59)
- Leaf lettuce (70.73)
- Chicory (73.36)
- Spinach (86.43)
- Beet green (87.08)
- Chard (89.27)
- Chinese cabbage (91.99)
- Watercress (1oo)
Who would have thought that watercress scores that high? Then again, you can hardly eat tons of it, as much as you wouldn’t make a meal consisting of nothing but parsley.
Not to mention that I have some deeply personal experiences with chicory.
Still, if you looked for some guidance about choosing healthy foods, this is way more reliable than the fantasies of health magazine editors. And sprinkling your salad with a little watercress sure doesn’t hurt.
Erm, …Fruits?
If you put the critical eye to that list that I expect of my readers, you’ll have noticed a glaring absence: where are the fruits? No apples? No bananas? Give me my strawberries! Aren’t those that healthy after all?
No, them missing is due to a scientific problem and no reason for a stern look at the humble banana.
Fruits contain physiologically active substances called “phytonutrients” thought to benefit human health. But there’s so many of them that so far no one has undertaken classifying them all. Your average apple, for example, comes with about 2,000. And that’s just for apples.
Have your fruits and take the above list as a guideline for vegetables, nothing more.
Does This Influence Your Nutrition?
I try to eat salads at least once a week and Romaine and leaf lettuce are regular guests in our kitchen. You’ll never get me to eat chicory, but the others I’ll think about inviting more.
Will you try to work them a bit more into your nutrition? Or are you triumphantly standing above us, saying “ha, I knew it all along”?
Picture courtesy of David Wagner.
6 Comments
I regularly eat five of the ten on that list. I like to eat raw foods much of the time. Where are broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels’s sprouts, etc? I’m thinking that the things they looked at were a little to narrow maybe.
Those came lower on the list and yes, it is not definitive but at least provides some guidance.
Weird indeed, I’ a big fan of arugula and dandelion greens and I am really surprised that they landed so much lower compared to lettuce on the list. Even more so if you check the Nutrition Data database that says that lettuce is little more than green coloured fiber with some watter thrown in the mix (even the palate agrees). Gotta read that article…
Well, what they did was judge nutrient content per 100 kcal. I wager that if they’d taken nutrients per 100 g, things might look different.
I used to subscribe to Nutrition Action Healthletter, put out by CSPI. CSPI’s activism is a bit shrill for my taste, but the mag was great. They had a booklet they sent when you subscribed that stack ranked the top basic foods…veg, fruit, beans, meats etc. based on a weighting of the most important macro- & micronutrients for that class of food. Going from memory…
For veg: no surprise that leafy greens came out on top, though carrots, peppers and tomatoes were high in the second tier.
For fruits: berries, citrus, and most tropical fruits (mangos, papaya, but not pineapple) were at the top of the list. Apples and grapes somewhat lower.
For beans: lentils were marginally better than other beans, but they were all pretty comparable, except soybeans which are a bit higher in sat fat.
Meats were largely about leaner cuts.
But all that aside, I try to think about diet largely in terms of what I’m not eating because I’m eating something healthy. So yes, collards are great and I eat them, but I’m not going to avoid beets just because they’re lower on some list. Because beets are fibre-filled and satiating, so when I eat beets I don’t have room for cheeseburgers. Which makes beets extremely healthy.
Which I guess gets to my biggest complaint about all of these lists…if they’re not ranking satiation, which none of them do, they’re missing a huge component of what makes a food healthy…making you full for a reasonable number of calories. I’ll take that over phytochemicals any day.
Thank you, Erik! You brought up some important clarification and points!