Humans Have ¡®Nutritional Wisdom¡¯: We Subconsciously Picking Nutrient-Rich Diets, Says Study
The results revealed that people often made sure they selected those foods that would meet their need for minerals and vitamins instead of energy-dense foods, to balance things out appropriately.
A new study has revealed that most humans today possess basic ¡®nutritional wisdom¡¯ to pick the food based on what nutrients their body needs, instead of always picking starchy, unhealthy ones.
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This is according to researchers from Bristol University who conducted a series of experiments involving 128 adults. The participants were shown images of fruits and vegetable pairing indicating their preference for certain food combinations.
The results revealed that people often made sure they selected those foods that would meet their need for minerals and vitamins instead of energy-dense foods, to balance things out appropriately.
Researchers said that even after controlling for explicit nutritional knowledge and food energy density, they saw a considerable tendency to select pairings that offered more total micronutrient intake and more ¡®micronutrient complementarity¡¯ (MC) -- essentially, a broader range of micronutrients.
In another analysis, they observed an identical pattern in two-component meals (e.g., steak and fries) extracted from a large national nutrition survey in the UK. The MC of these meals was way higher than would be predicted by chance. In fact, when a meal provided an excess of micronutrients then this occurred less often than by chance.
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They added, ¡°Together, this work provides new evidence that micronutrient composition influences food choice (a form of ¡®nutritional wisdom¡¯) and it raises questions about whether nutritional requirements are otherwise met through dietary ¡®variety seeking¡¯. In turn, it also exposes the potential for a complexity in human dietary decision making that has not been recognised previously.¡±
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