Best foods are full of nutrients

Foods with more nutrients, less calories, give you more bang for your buck

Date published: 12/18/2005

By JENNIFER MOTL

IF YOU HEED popular advice to eliminate fats and carbs, you knock out energizing and nourishing foods, too.

You stop eating foods such as almonds and avocados, which are both rich in heart-protecting monounsaturated fats and vitamin E. In fact, you're down to almost no foods at all.

Instead of cutting out fats and carbs to manage weight, focus on eating foods that naturally provide lots of vitamins and minerals. These almost always have healthy carbs and fats--the kind your body needs, and that don't weigh you down with empty calories.

Consider the "naturally nutrient-rich" score. Developed by University of Washington-Seattle researcher Adam Drewnowski, the NNR score takes into account 14 nutrients and total calories to calculate nutrient density.

Instead of counting calories, people can use the NNR system to "make each calorie count more," Drewnowski writes in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this fall.

The idea is to maximize nutrients and minimize calories for healthy adults.

Examples of foods with a high NNR score include most fruits and vegetables. Some of the best are spinach, broccoli, tomato, Romaine lettuce, cantaloupe, mango, tangerines, strawberries, kiwi, grapefruit, blueberries and avocados.

Whole fruits like grapes ranked higher than juices such as grape juice, because grapes provide more nutrients for fewer calories. Likewise, a sweet potato would earn a high NNR score, despite the moderate calories, because it is one of the richest natural sources of carotenoids. Those are antioxidants that appear to protect the heart and eyes.

Although they are high in calories, nuts earned high scores because they are good sources of heart-healthy fat and minerals. Likewise, peas, beans and lentils ranked high.

Lean cuts of beef, skim and low-fat milk, plain yogurt, clams and oysters also had high scores, while fried chicken and ice cream had lower scores because they have more calories. In the bread and cereal category, oatmeal had one of the higher scores.

The NNR score looks at 16 nutrients: protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin C, thiamine, riboflavin, vitamin B-12, folate, vitamin D, vitamin E, monounsaturated fat, potassium, zinc, fiber and pantothenic acid.

To calculate the score, Drewnowski figures out how much of a food you'd have to eat to provide 2,000 calories, then averages the percent daily value for the above nutrients.

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Date published: 12/18/2005