Shocking Food Discovery

13! - this is the amount of different foods I have eaten since last Wednesday.

13 different types of food in 7 days! Now this doesn't include beverages, and I've lumped green, red, and yellow peppers together as 'peppers' but still, this is not what I would call 'variety'.
To tell you the truth, I was shocked by the fact this number was not higher.

Whenever I'm asked the question "How can I improve my diet?" I try to always answer, "Eat a larger variety of foods"

It doesn't matter if you are an elite athlete, someone trying to lose a few pounds, or just trying to improve your overall health, the key to optimizing your nutrition is to eat as many different foods as possible.

Eating with variety creates what I call the 'Rainbow Effect'. Basically, you eat such a variety of foods that your diet ends up containing foods of every color imaginable.

Color is a good predictor of the nutrients in a food. Typically, the more color a food has, the more healthy nutrients it will contain (Skittles are exempt from this rule!).

Furthermore, each color has its own set of associated nutrients. So a red pepper will have slightly different nutrients than a blueberry would.

Because most of us are creatures of habit, we tend to eat the same foods day in and day out. When we get into this 'nutritional rut' we run the risk of not eating enough of the more obsure nutrients in foods, like flavonols and phenols.

An easy way to correct this is to try and increase the variety of foods we eat to at least 20 different foods in any given week, and to try AT LEAST one new food a month.

It doesn't have to be anything drastic, even a different spice will do (I tried a light dusting of cinnamon on my steak the other day and was pleasently suprised with the results).

Concentrating on variety is an easy nutritional custom that can drastically improve overall nutrition.

Brad and the team at grrlAthlete.com

PS- I had a chance to catch up with one of the athletes who is testing John Barban's new advanced circuit training program 'The 6 Minute Circuits Workout', and this is what she told me...

"Trying to fit in workouts around sports practices, classes and social life is always a challenge for University athletes. The best thing about Six Minute Circuits is that I get a complete workout in less than an hour. I didn't feel the need to supplement the workout with anything extra and by the end of the routine, I felt like I had given my entire body a good, hard workout."