What kind of a difference do really small servings of micronutrients make?

We often hear or read that this vegetable or fruit is rich in such and such micronutrient, but, in many cases, even health-conscious people following an otherwise balanced diet aren't realistically eating more than very small portions of certain things used as garnish or as small additives to a dish. (For instance, I have in mind things like putting oregano in pasta or a tomato slice on a sandwich.) So, while it's true that people should be eating plenty of full servings of vegetables and fruits per day anyway, I'm still curious what kind of difference, if any, these make, because they're still common in day-to-day food even if they don't constitute full servings on their own.

So, if a tomato is a great source of flavonoids and antioxidants like lycopene and beta carotene, is your one slice on a chicken sandwich going to make any kind of meaningful difference, when technically an entire tomato is the "serving" for nutritional purposes? Let's say you're even eating other fruits and vegetables in full servings but they happen to lack the concentration of particular micronutrients that tomatoes have. Do the handful of mushrooms in your omelet really do anything for you, even though they're a good source of nutrition en masse? Do you need to eat a lot of them to reap the benefits of their nutrient profile? Things like that.

It just seems to me like, while technically better than nothing, these kinds of things are more of a flavor garnish than anything else, and to really get a meaningful dose you need to be chopping them up whole and making salads, stir fries and other dishes which contain multiple entire fruits or vegetables, and eating these regularly. Again, this is assuming someone is eating full servings of fruits and vegetables regularly anyway. I'm just curious if the extra tiny stuff we eat anyway in other dishes count for anything significant additionally, especially if the trace portions contain specific micronutrients otherwise lacking in the full diet.


from Bodybuilding.com Forums - Nutrition https://ift.tt/Lg2FhoB

0 comments:

Post a Comment