"Eat the Rainbow"

This article is, once again, a rant - you can probably already tell from the illustration.

I read and hear the advice “Eat the Rainbow” very often. The idea is to eat as many vegetables as possible, in as many colours as possible.

But my brain consistently does something else with it. My thoughts go in two different directions:

What nutritional value do yellow, red, blue, green have?

Colours in nature serve many purposes: attracting (pollinators, animals) and deterring (predators). Sometimes the colour is just a side-effect of function - green, for example, often comes from chlorophyll, which is there for photosynthesis.

Unfortunately, you can’t tell from a plant’s colour whether it’s toxic or not. (It would be nice if you could go mushroom foraging with a Pantone palette instead of a field guide ⁽¹⁾)

And if you look more closely, most plants are more or less toxic to some degree. The ones we normally eat are mostly only mildly so - but all of them contain certain “anti-nutrients”. Some contain so few that they cause no acute problems for most people. Others can be processed enough to fall into that same category.

In other words: some varieties of yellow, red, blue, green etc. have genuine nutritional value. Others are problematic, and others still are outright toxic (please don’t eat green potatoes!).

And the second direction my thoughts go:

Is this hedging?

I consider it not out of the question. But what is hedging?

With that in mind: “But I told you to eat the rainbow. You clearly didn’t eat all the colours, otherwise you would have gotten all the nutrients you needed.”

Anyone who knows the meme where men and women describe the colours of the rainbow (the man names about 7, the woman around 50) can probably spot the mischief my brain is whispering to me there.

In short: I can do absolutely nothing with the advice “Eat the Rainbow.” ⁽²⁾ It always requires a follow-up explanation (“that’s not what I meant, I meant…”), and that, to me, is textbook hedging.

So what then?

Do I have the solution ^TM? Personally I’ve found one - but that’s not the point of this rant. Sometimes I’m just pointing a finger at something that’s annoying me.

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