6 Health Benefits of Nutrient Dense Foods

Nutrient dense foods are foods that provide you with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber, and other micro-nutrients. They are often fruits, vegetables, organs, fish, seafood, nuts and beans, and whole grains. They tend to be low in added sugars and fats, and are minimally processed. If it's from the ground, the sea, or the air, there's a good chance it's nutrient-dense. Now that you know what a nutrient-dense food is, we'll carry on with why you should eat them, and there are some great reasons!

Reason#1: More Energy

Nutrient-dense foods can provide you both with more energy, and more stable energy throughout the day. This is because nutrient-dense foods are high in vitamins and minerals, which your body uses to produce energy. They also contain fiber, which helps stabilize blood sugar. Rather than a spike and crash you'd get from something like a candy bar, for example, the energy your body produces from consuming an apple would last you longer because the apple contains fiber.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Why would I want to eat better food when I can just take a vitamin/supplement instead?” While supplements can play an important role in your diet, they are not a substitute for nutrient-dense foods because natural substances interact with your body much better than man-made supplements. Your body will absorb nutrients better and more efficiently from nutrient-dense food than from a pill.

Reason #2: More Satiety

Another reason to eat more nutrient-dense foods is that they give you more satiety. Satiety is the feeling of fullness you experience after eating, and achieving it is very important to maintaining a healthy weight: if you never feel full you're more likely to overeat. Nutrient-dense foods provide more satiety in two ways:

1. Higher fiber content

2. More bang for your buck calorically

As stated earlier, fiber helps stabilize blood sugar, leading to fullness for longer throughout the day and less crashes. Of course you'll still experience hunger, but when it's time to eat you won't feel like you're STARVING. Nutrient-dense foods also provide more back for the buck because they are lower in calories than processed foods that contain high fats and sugars. To demonstrate this, 500 calories could get you a 4×4 inch square of quiche made with egg, ground turkey & pork, spinach, kale, and sweet potato. That same 500 calories could also get you a king size Butterfinger. The quiche will likely keep you full for longer and is physically more food than the Butterfinger.

Reason #3: Mental Clarity

Having a good diet — one that is packed with nutrient-rich foods — will have a positive impact on your mental clarity. This goes back to the vitamins, minerals, and fiber. The better fuel you give your mind and body, the better it will function. Your body is hard-wired for survival and will adapt to whatever it is presented with. It can adapt to a diet high in processed and packaged foods. When this occurs, it begins to crave more of the sugary things it's used to getting more often, leading to withdrawal symptoms like headaches and brain fog due. Speaking of cravings, this leads right into reason 4.

Reason #4: Reduced Cravings

Your body is just like all the smart technology we have nowadays: smartphones, watches, even your Alexa. These items all notice and adapt to your patterns. Your body is similar: it will adapt to patterns in how you treat it and what you feed it. If you feed it items high in sugar, salt, and added fats, it will crave these items. Cravings are a natural part of life, but including more nutrient-dense foods in your diet diminishes these cravings so you’re less likely to over-consuming items high in salt, sugar, and added fats.

Reason #5: Fight Illness (now and in the future)

If you haven't been paying a ton of attention up to this point, this is where you should really dial in. A very important reason to eat more nutrient-dense foods is that they bolster your immune system, protecting you against illness and disease now and in the future. It's easy to underestimate the importance of vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients, but without them you are more susceptible to allergies, colds, and whatever other sicknesses go around throughout the year. Nutrient-dense foods give your body what it needs to defend itself.

Consuming foods high in vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients is like investing in the stock market. You've probably heard that you should invest early and often and that your money will compound over time. Same concept applies here. By consuming nutrient-dense foods often, you are fortifying your body against future illness, especially obesity. According to this article from the WHO, 74 million people a year die from cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke), chronic respiratory diseases, chronic respiratory disease (COPD, asthma), and diabetes, with one of the risk factors being unhealthy diet. This is not to say if you eat perfectly all the time nothing will happen to you, but, by investing in your health now, you can set yourself up to be less plagued by disease as you age.

Reason #6: Feel Good About Yourself!

The final reason you should eat more nutrient-dense food is because taking care of yourself feels GOOD! Just like bad decisions have a way of snowballing if not corrected, good decisions also build on themselves. It doesn't matter who you are, you deserve to feel GOOD!