Curious on behalf of my inner 5-year-old…
I’ve read that there is something about whole vegetables that make them more beneficial for your health, compared to eating ‘powdered’ vegetables in pills or shakes.
I’ve seen things like, “pills are unlikely to replicate the powerful, nutritional effects of whole food”, or… “supplements can help, but are not intended as a replacement for real veggies.”
But I’m confused: the (albeit not that trustworthy) marketing for powdered vegetable pills always sounds like they are literally just mashed-up and super dehydrated vegetables or something. So… if true, wouldn’t that have the same effect? Or is that a total misrepresentation of what the pills really are?
Thanks!
In: Biology
One of the issues with those vegetable powder pills is the amount of pills you would need to take to actually equal a healthy daily amount of vegetables. No matter how much you dehydrate a carrot, you can’t shrink it down to a single, small, pill.
Another is that the more processed a food is, the less healthy it is for you. As an example, eating a fresh apple is good for you, but a glass of apple juice is only a little better than a soda. Any form of processing results in some loss of nutrients. And while that’s not that big a deal with foods that go through one or two fairly simple steps of processing, like frozen fruit, or cooked vegetables. And some nutrients are even made more available by this level of processing. (like some carotenes that are more easily absorbed from cooked foods) the drying, powdering, and turning into pills means a lot of steps and a high percentage of the more fragile nutrients being lost. A good rule of thumb is, the less something looks like the original food, the more nutrient loss there is likely to be.
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