Nutrient Density

There are a lot of buzz words and phrases in the nutrition/health/wellness space. But very rarely are they clearly defined and we are often left on our own to decipher what they mean, adding our own personal biases and interpretations. This leads to unclear communication. You may read or hear one thing when something else was meant.

This miscommunication is way more common than you may think. It is often just a product of unclear definitions, but I thank that sometimes it can be exploited by people to create confusion and, potentially, plausible deniability.

I learned very early on when working with clients and patients that the best thing to do was to clearly define any terms I used, even if they seemed obvious to me. We are not all coming from the same place, so I cannot assume that something that seems clear to me, is clear to everyone.

In that vein, I want to talk about the phrase “nutrient density.”

Nutrient Density historically hasn’t been a super common term, perhaps because it isn’t as buzzy as things like “clean eating.” But I think that Nutrient Density is a much more useful term and, luckily, I have started seeing it being used more in the last few years.

Even on the surface, without going into a more detailed definition, the phrase Nutrient Density is already more specific. This phase literally refers to the density of nutrients in food, i.e. how many nutrients the food has.

I think density is pretty well covered, but to further define and clarify, let’s talk about the word “nutrients” and what that means in this context.

People often talk about the macronutrients – carbohydrates, protein, and fat – and this is especially true in the world of athletics. But those are only three of the nutrients found in food; there are many, many more micronutrients – the vitamins and minerals.

When I look at a food from a nutrient density perspective, I want that food to have as many nutrients as possible, the more the better. But I’m not focused on any single nutrient or nutrient category (macro or micro). And while this may seem odd, I don’t generally pay too much attention to the quantity of each individual nutrient.

Part of the reason for this is that an intense focus on single nutrients as standalones has led us to a nutritional environment where we think that we can fix anything by manipulating individual nutrients. This is only possible because we can isolate and manufacture single nutrients in a lab. But here’s the trick, nutrients in nature do not come singly; they are always in a nutritional package. And how that nutrient package is composed is way beyond us humans.

We focus on the macronutrients and occasionally mention the micronutrients, but what about all of the other compounds found in plants and animals? The phytochemicals? The so-called “meat-protein factor”? We have very little understanding of these things, we can’t reproduce them in a lab, and we certainly do not understand enough to be able to create a nutritional package with all of the components that Mother Nature would include nor do we really know what the quantity of those nutrients should be.

Humans have decided how much we need of specific nutrients, but those are generally based on our knowledge of nutrient related disorders. We know that having too little Vitamin C will lead to scurvy, and we have a general idea of how much Vitamin C you need to prevent scurvy, and we have a good sense of how much Vitamin C will cause negative effects, but we have no idea what the optimal, habitual dose of Vitamin C actually is.

And here’s the thing, we managed to not just survive, but thrive for millennia without that “knowledge.” Because we ate Mother-Nature-made food, and Mother Nature pretty much always packs in as much nutrient density as possible. That includes the nutrients we understand, the nutrients we don’t, and probably even some that we haven’t discovered yet.

This is why, for most healthy individuals, I’d rather focus on just eating as much Mother-Nature-made, nutrient dense food as possible and let the rest sort itself out. Plus, this makes eating super simple because from a Nutrient Density perspective, you really can’t beat a diet based in veggies, meat, and fruit.