Vegetable Oils: Beware of Common Fats That Are Even More Dangerous Than Trans Fats

By Elaine Charles, part 8 in my series on healthy eating

Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Nina was one the reporters who initially broke the story on the dangers of trans fats, 10 years ago, in an article for Gourmet magazine.

It received an enormous amount of attention, which eventually led to a contract for a book on trans fats. At the same time, she was working as a restaurant review critic, and the meals she received from the chef were foods she’d never eaten before.

“Liver, creamy sauces, cheeses, red meat – and I found them to be delicious. Rich, earthy textured foods. I also found that I lost this stubborn 10 pounds I had been fighting for the most of my adult life, and my doctor said my cholesterol levels were fine.”

These are the types of foods that are said to be really bad for your health, yet she had the complete opposite experience. As an investigative reporter, she felt compelled to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Along the way, she also discovered that while trans fats are now increasingly on the “outs,” the vegetable oils replacing trans fats may be even more harmful…

How Trans Fats Became the Backbone of the Food Industry

Most edible oil chemists are men, Nina notes, but there was one woman in the field, Mary Enig PhD, who had been warning people about trans fats starting in the late 1970s.

No one was listening to her though, and she was widely regarded as a bit of a crackpot. An independent thinker, Dr. Enig was also a pioneer in educating people—myself included—about the health dangers of unfermented soy.

“Trans fats come about when vegetable oil is hardened,” Nina explains. “Vegetable oils only entered the American food supply in the early 1900s.

Before 1900, American housewives cooked with lard and butter. Then vegetable oils, first in the form of cottonseed oils, came in. The very first hardened vegetable oil product was Crisco, introduced in 1911.

That’s when trans fats, which are produced when you harden oil through hydrogenation, entered the US food supply.”

Hydrogenated vegetable oils and margarine quickly became the backbone of the food industry. They ramped up from zero percent of the food supply to seven or eight percent today.

According to Nina, the increase in the amount of vegetable oils we eat is the single biggest increase in any kind of food nutrient over the course of the 20th century.

According to one calculation, we now eat more than 100,000 times more vegetable oils than we did at the beginning of the century. Vegetable oils were virtually nonexistent at the beginning of the century. Now, they make up about 7-8 percent of all calories consumed by the American public.

“Every packaged food—every cookie, cracker, microwave popcorn, frozen food—everything was made with trans fats. And our French fries were fried in them,” she says.

“But it turns out that trans fats – due to the work of Mary Enig (who signaled the alarm) and another researcher whom you’ve interviewed, Fred Kummerow, – they were found to have health problems. They interfered in the basic cellular membrane functioning.”

Trans Fat Harm Was Identified in the 1930s

Indeed, Dr. Fred Kummerow—now nearly 100 years old— realized the hazards of trans fats in the 1950’s, and was the first researcher to publish a paper on it in 1957. He discovered that it’s not cholesterol that causes heart disease, rather the trans fats are to blame.

Still, trans fats didn’t become a major issue in the US until the early 2000s, when it was found that they slightly raise your LDL cholesterol. Since the expert community is so focused on cholesterol to the exclusion of everything else, they started banning trans fats based on that cholesterol effect.

“That was also the reason that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to finally decide to put trans fats on the food label. They wanted consumers to know that foods contained trans fats because by the late 2000s, they were considered really to be a dangerous kind of fat,” Nina says.

“To me, it’s definitely true that trans fats are not healthy for us. But I’m not sure that they were condemned based on the right reason.”

The Cholesterol Fallacy

In the 1950s, saturated fats were condemned on the basis of them raising your cholesterol. At that time, we had only a primitive understanding of what causes heart disease. But we could measure HDL and LDL cholesterol, and the research community focused in on LDL, which became known as the “bad cholesterol.”

Since then, a large number of clinical trials have shown that LDL cholesterol levels, except in extreme cases, actually are very poor predictors of heart attack risk.

And, as our understanding of biomarkers has evolved over the last 15 years, it turns out there are other biomarkers that far more accurately predict heart risks, such as your LDL particle number.

“But going back to trans fat, it was condemned on the basis of LDL. It seems like the wrong piece of evidence against trans fats. There were plenty of other things that were worrisome about trans fats that make that perhaps not a bad decision, except for one big thing—nobody really thought about what would replace trans fats,” Nina says.

Heated Vegetable Oils Create Harmful Oxidation Byproducts

On a side note, there’s also the issue of glyphosate contamination and genetic engineering that make vegetable oils of today even more hazardous than the earlier varieties. That said, from the very beginning, vegetable oils always had the problem that they were unstable.

When heated, especially to high temperatures, they degrade into oxidation products. More than 100 dangerous oxidation products have been found in a single piece of chicken fried in vegetable oils, Nina says.

“That’s the reason that vegetable oils were hardened to be able to be used in the first place,” she says. “They couldn’t be used simply as oil. Once there was a technology that figured out how to use them just as oils by actually changing the fatty acid structure in oils, vegetable oils in bottles like Wesson Oil and canola oils came to the market, in the 1940s.

But even back then, in a number of animal experiments that were done, there were tremendously worrying results. Animals would get cirrhosis of the liver or enlarged liver. And then when they were eating heated vegetable oils, they would die prematurely.”

So, while trans fats are being recognized as harmful and are  in the process of being completely eliminated, we’re still faced with a huge problem, because restaurants and food service operations are reverting back to using regular vegetable oils (such as peanut, corn, and soy oil) again for frying. But these oils still have the worrisome problem of degrading into toxic oxidation products when heated!

Trans Fats Are Being Replaced with Equally Worrisome Oil Products

The latest issue of Wise Traditions, the Weston Price journal, has a great article that is an excerpt from her book, in which she discusses this topic. Most of you reading this are now well aware of the dangers of trans fats, and that the FDA is in the process of banning them completely. That’s great news, but the question is, what is trans fat being replaced with? The answer is that the oils they’re currently using in lieu of trans fats create toxic oxidation products, which in fact may be more toxic than trans fat.

“I stumbled on this topic because a vice president of Loders Croklaan, a big fats and oils producer, said to me, ‘I just heard this terrifying talk by a man in a company who does all the cleaning for fast food restaurants.’… He said they have been having problems since restaurants started getting rid of trans fats in their fryers around 2007… The new oils were building up gunk in the drains and on the walls.

This kind of gunk would harden, and workers would scrape for days and not be able to get it off. The conventional cleaners didn’t work anymore. It’s turning out to be these highly volatile airborne chemicals. When the restaurants’ uniforms would be cleaned, the chemicals were so volatile that they would have problems of piles of uniforms spontaneously combusting in the back of trucks. And then they would go to the dryers. The heat of the dryers, even after the restaurant uniforms were cleaned, would cause fires.”

The cleaning company ended up producing a more potent chemical cleaner to scrub off the polymers off the walls and uniforms. Unfortunately, the nutrition community is not studying these volatile vegetable oils. Others, primarily in the molecular biology and genetics fields are, but the different fields are not communicating with each other.

Even Low Levels of Aldehydes Cause Massive Inflammation

One group in Taiwan is studying this issue because women have much higher rates of lung cancer than men. They think it may be related to the fact that women, particularly in Asian countries, stir-fry in unventilated spaces using vegetable oils. In Norway, there’s another research group trying to assess the effects on worker health in restaurants.

“[These volatile compounds] are very hard to study because they are very ephemeral, literally changing from one second to the next…They’re very unstable. They’re hard to isolate,” Nina explains. “One thing they did was simply to show that these products exist.  There’s a whole category called aldehydes, which are particularly worrisome.

A group doing research on animals have found that at fairly low levels of exposure, these aldehydes in animals caused tremendous inflammation, which is related to heart disease. They oxidized LDL cholesterol, which is thought to be the LDL cholesterol that becomes dangerous. There’s a link to heart disease. There’s also some evidence that links these aldehydes in particular to Alzheimer’s. They seem to have a very severe effect on the body.”

One researcher has found that aldehydes cause toxic shock in animals through gastric damage. We now know a lot more about the role your gut plays in your health, and the idea that aldehydes from heated vegetable oils can damage your gastric system is frighteningly consistent with the rise we see in immune problems and gastrointestinal-related diseases.

“When the FDA got rid of trans fats… restaurants began to use these regular liquid oils instead… they were the cheapest possible option to use… The FDA really did not consider any of this literature about these oxidation products. When you implement a law, you’re supposed to look at the risks. What will happen if you implement a new regulation? In this case, the FDA did not,” Nina says.

In hearing this, it appears as though cooking with vegetable oil could be a “new” occupational hazard (having occurred within the last 10 years or so) for restaurant workers. If vegetable oils volatize and gum up into polymers that are nearly impossible to clean, and that are damaging fryers, equipment, and causing uniforms to spontaneously combust, what is it doing to the workers’ lungs? Larger fast food chains are aware of this issue, and have implemented a number of fixes to address it. But smaller restaurants may be unaware of this problem, thereby placing workers at potential risk. The same applies if you’re regularly cooking with vegetable oils in your home.

Saturated Fats Are Stable, and Therefore Ideal for Cooking

Tallow is a hard fat that comes from cows. Lard is a hard fat that comes from pigs. They’re both animal fats, and used to be the main fats used in cooking. One of their benefits is that, since they’re saturated fats, they do not oxidize when heated. And saturated fats do not have double bonds that can react with oxygen; therefore they cannot form dangerous aldehydes or other toxic oxidation products.

“They’re solids at room temperature. That’s why they make great cooking fats and have always made great cooking fats. But we don’t think about that. This whole chain of events has happened because we demonized saturated fats,” Nina notes.

Fortunately, we’re now seeing cracks in the prevailing dogma about saturated fats. In March of this year, a groundbreaking meta-analysis reviewed the clinical trial evidence and the epidemiological evidence, and came to the conclusion that saturated fats really cannot be said to cause heart disease. Another meta-analysis three years earlier came to the same conclusion.

Saturated Fat – It Does a Body Good…

The benefits of saturated fat are many. Some appear to be uniquely traceable to saturated fat. For example, you need saturated fats for brain and immune system health. Another argument is that animal foods in general, including meat cheese, butter, dairy, and eggs, contain high amounts of vitamins. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, and you have to have the fat that comes naturally in animal foods along with the vitamins in order to absorb those vitamins.

“If you’re drinking skim milk, you don’t have the fat you need to absorb the vitamins in milk. Without absorbing the vitamins, you can’t absorb the minerals. These are uniquely nutrient-dense foods. Vitamin B6 and B12, you can’t get in plant foods. They’re really nutrient-dense foods that come packaged in the fat that you need to absorb them, along with protein. They’re kind of a perfect package of nutrient-dense food,” Nina says.

Nina also points out that many clinical trials over the past decade have clearly showed that a diet higher in fat and restricted in carbohydrate results in health improvements such as weight loss and a reduction in risk factors for diabetes, and heart disease. A high-fat diet typically means eating animal foods. Of course, there are very healthy saturated plant fats as well—coconut oil and palm oil, specifically. (Avocado, another healthy fat, is unsaturated.)

“[Coconut and palm oil] have been used for millennia in Asian cultures. They are making a big comeback in part because vegans who don’t want to eat animal products have found that they still need a fat for cooking that doesn’t oxidize when it’s heated… Coconut oil fills that function. In the food industry, they’ve started to bring back palm oil, which has a lot of saturated fat in it and is a good way to make food that lasts long on a shelf, because again, saturated fats are more stable and long-lasting.”

Healthy Eating Guidelines for the 21^st Century

So, what’s the general 21st century revised rule for healthy living and eating? One of the most important points is that you do not need to avoid saturated fats. Saturated fats were unfairly condemned in the 1950s based on very primitive evidence that has since been re-analyzed. The evidence now clearly shows that saturated fats do not cause heart disease. Moreover, your body needs saturated fats for proper function of your:

• Cell membranes
• Liver
• Immune system
• Heart
• Lungs
• Satiery (reducing hunger)
• Bones (to assimilate calcium)
• Hormones
• Genetic regulation

“Another key piece of information is that a high-fat, carbohydrate-restricted diet looks healthier for losing weight, and making your heart disease biomarkers and diabetes biomarkers look better. There’s a real range in how much carbohydrates people will tolerate,” Nina says.

Many people need to increase the healthful fat in their diet to 50-85 percent of daily calories. This includes not only saturated fat but also monounsaturated fats (from avocados and nuts) and omega-3 fats. When it comes to cooking fats, few compare to tallow and lard in terms of health benefits and safety. These are the cooking fats that were originally used, and they’re excellent frying fats.

Two Meals a Day Is Ideal, But Which Two Is Up to You

By Elaine Charles, part 5 in my series on healthy eating

How many meals a day is ideal? There are many answers to this question, but if you want to optimize your lifespan and decrease your risk for developing chronic degenerative diseases, the answer is becoming very clear.

The longstanding conventional answer is that most people need three square meals a day with snacks in between to maintain stable blood sugar and insulin levels.

However, there’s compelling evidence suggesting this near-continuous grazing may be partially to blame for the obesity and diabetes epidemic.

The most obvious risk with spreading out your meals to morning, noon, and evening is overeating. Other less obvious risks are biological changes that result in metabolic dysfunction, subsequent weight gain, and diminished health.

This blog is for individuals who DO NOT have insulin resistance. I will cover that topic next week.

The Case Against Eating Multiple Meals a Day

According to Dr. Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, where he studies meal timing and calorie restriction, even three meals a day may be too much.

Based on his research, he’s convinced the fewer meals you eat, the better you’ll fare overall. As reported by Time Magazine:

“Longo says studies that support a grazing approach tend to be flawed in predictable ways. They often look only at the short-term effects of increasing meal frequency.

While your appetite, metabolism, and blood sugar might at first improve, your system will grow accustomed to your new eating schedule after a month or two. When that happens, your body will start expecting and craving food all day long instead of only around midday or dinnertime.”

Eat Breakfast or Dinner, but Not Both…

While I’m still convinced that intermittent fasting is an important strategy for effective weight loss and disease prevention, it likely doesn’t matter which meal you skip — breakfast or dinner — as long as you skip one of them.

The benefits of intermittent fasting are:

•    Increases secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), a fat-burning hormone
•    Increases catecholamines, which increases resting energy expenditure
•    Decreases insulin levels and improves insulin sensitivity
•    Increases ghrelin, aka “the hunger hormone,” thereby reducing overeating
•    Shifts your body from burning sugar to burning fat as its primary fuel

If you have a physically taxing job, you are likely better off eating a solid breakfast and lunch, and then skipping dinner. The key to remember is to only eat within a window of six to eight consecutive hours each day, and avoiding food for at least three hours before bedtime.

As long as you restrict your eating to this window, you can choose between having breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner, but avoid having both breakfast and dinner.

If you chose to eat dinner, it’s important to avoid eating for at least three hours before going to bed.

This is another important factor that can help optimize your mitochondrial function and prevent cellular damage from occurring, which will be in the next segment.

That said, none of this probably applies to normal weight teens or growing children. They likely need three square meals a day unless they’re overweight. For kids and teens, the type of food they eat would be a primary consideration.

Ideally, all of their meals would revolve around eating REAL FOOD — not processed foods, fast food, and sugary snacks. Drinking plenty of pure water and avoiding sugary beverages is another key consideration.

The Benefits of Avoiding Late-Night Eating

If you want to live a long healthy life and avoid chronic degenerative diseases then it’s important to have a minimum of three hours after your last food intake before you go to bed.

This is due to the way your body produces energy. Many don’t realize that your mitochondria are responsible for “burning” the fuel your body consumes and converting into usable energy.

These tiny bacterial derivatives live inside your cell and are optimized to create energy from the food you eat and the oxygen in the air you breathe. Your cells have between 100 and 100,000 mitochondria.

Your mitochondria create energy by generating electrons that are normally transferred to ATP (adenosine triphosphate). When you don’t have insulin resistance this energy transfer works quite nicely, but when you are insulin resistant or you eat excessively, dysfunctions tend to emerge.

If you consume more calories than your body can immediately use, there will be an excess of free electrons, which back up inside your mitochondria.

These electrons are highly reactive and they start to leak out of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. These excess electrons leak out and wind up prematurely killing the mitochondria, and then wreak further havoc by damaging your cell membranes and contributing to DNA mutations.

There are many knowledgeable experts that believe this type of mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the keys to accelerated aging.

So how can you apply this knowledge? Simple: resolve your insulin resistance as soon as you can (next week’s blog), and do not eat for AT LEAST three hours before you go to sleep.

Your body will use the least amount of calories when sleeping, so the last thing you need is excess fuel at this time that will generate excessive free radicals that will damage your tissues, accelerate aging, and contribute to chronic disease.

Interestingly, if you have insulin resistance, intermittent fasting is, without a doubt, the most powerful intervention I know of to help you resolve it. This is one of the reasons why I now believe skipping dinner may be an even better strategy than skipping breakfast.

Clearly skipping dinner is more difficult to implement from a social perspective, but it might be a superior biological strategy.

Can Drinking Water Before Meals Help You Lose Weight?

In related news, recent research suggests drinking 500 ml (a little more than two eight-ounce glasses) of water half an hour before your meals may help boost weight loss. Obese participants who “pre-loaded” with water before each meal lost an average of nearly three pounds (close to 1.5 kilos) more than the control group over the course of three months.

All participants, including the control group, received a weight management consultation on how to improve their diet and exercise. Those who ate three meals a day and drank water prior to each meal lost an average of nearly 9.5 pounds (4.3 kilos) in three months.

Calorie Restriction Benefits Your Health

Getting back to intermittent fasting, many studies have confirmed the health benefits of calorie restriction, and it seems clear that eating less is part of the equation if you want to live longer. Interestingly, research has shown that life-long calorie restriction in mice “significantly changes the overall structure of the gut microbiota” in ways that promote longevity. So one reason why calorie restriction may lengthen lifespan appears to be due to the positive effect it has on gut microbiota.

The increase in longevity is also clearly associated with a decrease in disease states that would cut your life short, and calorie restriction is associated with a number of health improvements, including reduced visceral fat, reduced inflammation, lower blood pressure, and improved insulin sensitivity, just to name a few. Earlier research has demonstrated that calorie restriction helps extend the lifespan of animals by improving insulin sensitivity and inhibiting the mTOR pathway.

However, few people are keen on the idea of cutting your daily calories by about 25 percent or more for the rest of your life, and the good news is, you don’t have to.

Research has shown that intermittent fasting results in many of the same benefits as calorie restriction — even if you don’t place any restrictions on the number of calories you consume when you do eat.

Why Intermittent Fasting Is Beneficial Over Calorie Restriction

Intermittent fasting also has a number of added benefits over strict calorie restriction. For starters, it’s a lot easier to comply with, and compliance is everything. The calorie restriction route is also extremely dependent on high quality nutrition — you want to sacrifice calories without sacrificing any important micronutrients — and this can be another hurdle for many who are unfamiliar with nutrition and what actually constitutes a healthy diet.

You also want to avoid the counting calories and calorie restriction fallacies. Most people fail to appreciate that there are many intricate biochemical dynamics that occur that are unaccounted for when you just count “calories in and calories out.”

In terms of calorie restriction and weight, humans also tend to have an innate resistance to excessive weight loss, even in the face of severe calorie restriction. Dr. Ancel Keys demonstrated this in the mid-1940s when he designed an experiment to investigate the impact of starvation on human beings.

Thirty-six young healthy male volunteers were placed on a 24-week calorie-restricted diet of about 1,600 calories per day. They also had to walk for about 45 minutes a day. But instead of resulting in continuous weight loss, at 24 weeks their weight had stabilized, and no more weight loss could be elicited even when he reduced calorie intake down to 1,000 or less per day.

The drawbacks were clear. The men became obsessed with food to the exclusion of everything else in their life, and when the calorie restriction ended, they all over-reacted. Within a few weeks, they regained all of the lost weight plus about 10 percent more. Other studies have come to similar conclusions. So starvation-type diets may not be ideal for the average person. Your body will tend to shut down various processes in order to survive. For example, by reducing thyroid function, your body will not burn as many calories.

All of this may seem hopelessly contradictory. On the one hand, calorie restriction promotes beneficial biological changes that tend to extend life; on the other, there are built in mechanisms that when triggered by chronic calorie restriction can trigger other health problems. These are complex issues, and any extreme measure is likely to cause more problems than it solves.

The best we can do is come up with some general guidelines that replicate ancestral patterns. Daily intermittent fasting and avoiding eating for a number of hours before bedtime has many advantages over general calorie restriction and other radical diets, while providing many of the same benefits with a minimum of risk.

To Lose Fat You Need to Retrain Your Body to Burn Fat for Fuel

When you consistently eat every few hours and never miss a meal, your body becomes very inefficient at burning fat as a fuel, and this is where the trouble starts. It’s important to recognize that, with few exceptions, you cannot burn body fat if you have other fuel available, and if you’re supplying your body with carbohydrates every few hours, your body has no need to dive into your fat stores. When you apply intermittent fasting you not only avoid this but also will typically decrease your food costs and increase your health.

Eating fewer meals and timing those meals to occur closer together is one of the most effective strategies I’ve found to trigger your body to more effectively burn fat for fuel, and normalize your insulin and leptin sensitivity. If you’re not insulin resistant, intermittent fasting is not as crucial, but may still be beneficial.

If you’re among the minority of Americans who do not struggle with insulin resistance, recommendations are to simply avoid eating at least three hours before bedtime. That automatically allows you to “fast” for at least 11 hours or longer depending on if and when you eat breakfast.

Equally important is the recommendation to EAT REAL FOOD when you do eat, meaning food in the most natural form you can find, ideally whole organic produce, and pasture-raised when it comes to meats and animal products like diary and eggs. To that, add avoiding sitting, engaging in non-exercise movement throughout the day, and getting regular exercise. Exercise will not produce significant weight loss without addressing your diet, but when done in combination it can be significantly beneficial.

Top 7 Nutrient-Dense Foods That Make Calorie Counting Obsolete

By Elaine Charles, part 2 in my series on health eating

If you’re seeking to lose excess weight, counting calories is usually less than helpful. In fact, focusing on calories could easily divert you from the real answer, which lies in optimizing your nutrition.

We’ve long advocated against counting calories. Even if you manage to shed a few pounds, you’re not going to get healthier by eating fewer cookies than you did before.

In short, if you really want to lose weight and improve your health, then you must replace empty calories and denatured foods with nutrient-rich ones.

Nutritional Value Beats Calorie Count

Fortunately, even conventional health experts are now starting to catch on, and rather than looking at calories, they suggest looking at the nutritional value of the foods you eat.

As reported by Medical Daily:

“An editorial published in Open Heart suggests the outdated practice of counting calories has to go…

‘Shifting the focus away from calories and emphasizing a dietary pattern that focuses on food quality rather than quantity will help to rapidly reduce obesity, related diseases, and cardiovascular risk,’ the research team said in a statement.”

Why Counting Calories Doesn’t Work

According to the calorie myth, in order to lose weight all you need to do is follow the equation of “eat less, move more.” But this simply isn’t true.

Zoe Harcombe’s book, “The Obesity Epidemic”, is one of the most comprehensive documents that exposes the flaws of this myth.

The Obesity Epidemic – Public Lecture at Cardiff Metropolitan University

Research by Dr. Robert Lustig has also shredded this dogmatic belief, showing that not even calories from different kinds of sugar are treated identically by your body.

According to Dr. Lustig, fructose is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.” What this means is that identical calorie counts from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, will cause entirely different metabolic effects.

Part of the problem is a fundamental error in the understanding of the law of thermodynamics. Energy is actually used up in making nutrients available in your body.

Your body also self-regulates the amount of activity you engage in, based on the available energy. If your energy stores are low, you’ll feel lethargic and unlikely to exercise, even if you know you “should.”

“Results of the Action for Health in Diabetes study have shown that type 2 diabetes patients who adopt a lower calorie diet on top of increased physical activity have the same risk for death caused by a heart condition, even if the diet resulted in substantial weight loss.

The research team suggests that simple dietary changes that focus on macronutrients (fat, carbs, and protein) and sugar consumption rather than calorie counting can efficiently improve health outcomes.”

Seven of the Most Nutrient-Dense Foods on the Planet

You can only eat so much in a day, and if you consider your stomach to be “prime real estate,” you’d be wise to consider the nutritional value of the foods you’re putting in it. Some foods pack far more nutrients into a smaller package than others.

For example, while many equate eating salad with optimizing their diet, this is not necessarily true, depending on what’s in your salad. If lettuce and cucumbers make up the majority of that bulk, you’re getting plenty of water, yes, but few valuable nutrients.

Authority Nutrition lists 11 foods densely packed with valuable nutrients. Here are my own top seven picks.

1. Wild-caught Alaskian Salmon:
   1. When it comes to fish, two things to take into account are 1) healthy fat content, and 2) contamination levels.
   2. Wild-caught Alaskan salmon is likely one of the best seafood options as it’s high in omega-3 fat (about 2.8 grams per 100 gram serving) and low in contaminants.
   3. About 95 percent of your cells’ membranes are made of fat, and without fats such as omega-3, your cells cannot function properly.
   4. Since wild salmon eat what nature programmed them to eat, they have a more complete nutritional profile with valuable micronutrients, fats, minerals (including magnesium, potassium, and selenium), vitamins (including all the B-vitamins), and antioxidants like astaxanthin.
   5. Avoid farmed salmon, as they’re fed an artificial diet consisting of grain products like corn and soy, chicken- and feather meal, artificial coloring, and synthetic astaxanthin — all of which negatively affects the nutritional profile of farmed salmon.
2. Bone broth:
   1. Bone broth is exceptionally healing for your gut, and contains a number of valuable nutrients that many Americans lack, in a form your body can easily absorb and use.
   2. This includes but is not limited to: calcium, phosphorus, and other minerals; silicon and other trace minerals; glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate; components of collagen and cartilage; components of bone and bone marrow; and the “conditionally essential” amino acids proline, glycine, and glutamine (which have anti-inflammatory effects).
3. Kale:
   1. In terms of nutritional density, kale is virtually unparalleled among green leafy vegetables.
   2. Interestingly, it has a 3:1 carbohydrate-to-protein ratio – an exceptionally high amount of protein for any vegetable.
   3. Like beef, it also contains all nine essential amino acids needed to form the proteins within the human body, plus nine other non-essential ones for a total of 18.
   4. In addition, kale contains omega-3s in a beneficial ratio to omega-6, and is exceptionally rich in vitamins A, C, and K1.
   5. It’s also loaded with vision-preserving lutein and zeaxanthin at over 26 mg combined, per serving.
   6. Add to this an impressive list of minerals as well, including more calcium per gram than whole milk, and in a more bioavailable form. Other bioactive compounds such as isothiocyanates and indole-3-carbinol have been shown to have anti-cancer properties.
4. Raw garlic and aged black pepper:
   1. Garlic contains a range of phytocompounds that synergistically produce a wide variety of responses in your body, including reducing inflammation and boosting immune function. It’s been shown to successfully combat even antibiotic-resistant infections.
   2. Rich in manganese, calcium, phosphorus, selenium, and vitamins B6 and C, garlic is beneficial for your bones as well as your thyroid.
   3. Beyond that, studies have demonstrated garlic’s positive effects for more than 150 different diseases, including cancer.
5. Sprouts:
   1. A wide variety of seeds can be sprouted, which maximizes their nutritional value.
6. Organic eggs:
   1. Overall, eggs are one of Nature’s most perfect foods, loaded with high quality protein, healthy fats and cholesterol, vitamins, and minerals. Just make sure they come from organic pastured hens.
   2. Egg yolks are a rich source of the antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin: two powerful prevention elements of age-related macular degeneration; the most common cause of blindness, and the choline in eggs is important for brain health.
   3. Proteins in cooked eggs are also converted by gastrointestinal enzymes producing peptides that act as ACE inhibitors (common prescription medications for lowering blood pressure).
7. Liver:
   1. Liver from grass-fed animals is a superfood of the animal kingdom, and one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat.
   2. For example, liver is nature’s most concentrated source of vitamin A (retinol), and contains an abundant, highly usable form of iron.
   3. It’s also one of the richest sources of copper and folic acid.
   4. Three ounces of beef liver contains almost three times as much choline as one egg, and it also contains a mysterious “anti-fatigue factor,” making it a favorite among athletes.

Shopping Wisely to Maximize Your Food Budget

Most people use standard measures of quantity when comparing prices, but a wiser strategy might be to focus on nutrient content instead. For example, conventional USDA prime beef may be cheaper than organic grass-fed beef pound for pound, but when you take nutritional factors into account, the latter provides far better value for your money.

“The corollary to the nutrition problem is the expense problem. The makings of a green salad — say, a head of lettuce, a cucumber, and a bunch of radishes — cost about $3 at my market. For that, I could buy more than two pounds of broccoli, sweet potatoes, or just about any frozen vegetable, which would make for a much more nutritious side dish…”

Here, I would add that if you really like salad, there are simple and very cost-effective ways to dramatically boost its nutrient content. For example, adding a handful of sprouts, an organic egg, some raw nuts or seeds, with a drizzling of virgin olive oil on top in lieu of salad dressing would turn your nutritionally lackluster salad into a more nutrient-dense meal without adding much expense.

Here are tips for squeezing the most nutrient rich food from your dollar:

1. Buy more of the inexpensive varieties of organic vegetables. Less pricey produce include carrots, onions, celery, garlic, kale, chard, zucchini, cabbage, and broccoli — all of which contain valuable nutrients at a reasonable price, even when organic.
2. Make broth and say yes to liver. The nutrient value of both have already been addressed above, and in terms of cost, broth and liver are among the least expensive foods you’ll find.
3. Avoid food waste. Buy only what you know you’ll eat before the food goes bad. Alternatively, turn leftover veggies, meats, and other scraps into soup. Chicken carcasses can be boiled down into nourishing broth.
4. Prepare and cook foods to maximize nutritional value. Knowing how a food is affected by the way it’s prepared or cooked can go a long way toward maximizing your nutrition. For example, valuable nutrients in eggs are destroyed through cooking, so eating your eggs as close to raw or as lightly cooked as possible will optimize their nutritional potential. As mentioned earlier, grains and seeds gain a significant boost in nutrients when sprouted, and vegetables in general get a nutritional boost when fermented, as this makes them a great source of probiotics. If fermented using a specific starter culture, they can also provide ample amounts of vitamin K2.
5. Buy local pastured eggs. Eggs from truly organic, free-range chickens not only have higher nutrient content than commercially raised eggs, they’re also far less likely to contain dangerous bacteria such as salmonella. When buying local, you’re also getting fresher eggs, as they’ve not been shipped across the country.
6. Embrace traditional home cooking, and avoid buying prepackaged foods. This means cooking from scratch, using whole unadulterated ingredients, so you know exactly what’s in your meal.