Colour coding is latest approach to healthful diet Carole Sugarman, contributor What colour is your diet? If it's brown and beige, "you're in deep trouble," says David Heber, director of the UCLA Centre for Human Nutrition in the United States. As in steaks and baked potatoes. Burgers and fries. That colour scheme may work well in your family room. But it's not complementing your genes, your vision, your heart and your ability to fight off cancer and other diseases, says Heber, author of the just-published "What Colour Is Your Diet?" (Regan Books), which recommends a far more vibrant eating approach. In the latest attempt to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables, hues are hot. "We want you to get colour into your diet," says James Joseph, lab chief of the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Centre on Ageing at Tufts University and co-author of "The Colour Code", to be published by Hyperion next spring. The National Cancer Institute's five-a-day programme has a new campaign called "Sample the Spectrum", which advises people to colour their daily diets with fruits and vegetables that are bright orange, deep red, dark green, blue, purple and yellow. "We're trying to make people understand that fruits and vegetables in their most colourful form have the most nutritional bang for the buck," says Linda Nebeling, chief of health promotion at NCI. "You get far more nutritional value from an orange than French fries." While there's convincing evidence that populations that eat more produce have lower rates of chronic diseases, scientists are now learning just what makes fruits and vegetables so beneficial. Phytochemicals - the hundreds of different compounds produced by plants that can protect "them" from oxygen, sunlight, bad weather, insects and other sources of harm - can provide protection to humans, too. Colour enters the picture because some phytochemicals are responsible for the pigments in produce. Anthocyanin, the substance that makes a blueberry blue, for example, has antioxidant characteristics that can be powerful cancer fighters. Tomatoes are red because of lycopene, an antioxidant that has been linked to lower rates of cancer as well as decreased rates of heart disease. Combination Scientists believe that phytochemicals work in combination with one another. So it's not enough to just eat red or blue. The idea is to redesign your plate with a variety of brightly coloured fruits and vegetables, with beige - as in chicken breast, whole-wheat bread - as an accent colour. Mr. Heber, for example, recommends that you reduce your meat portion from six ounces to three and switch from mashed potatoes to sliced carrots and from corn to spinach. Then add more colours with few extra calories, such as red pepper, tomato sauce, garlic, onions or broccoli. Top off your chicken or fish with rinds of oranges or lemons and have mixed berries for dessert, he writes. These recommendations are part of Mr. Heber's "colour code", which divides fruits and vegetables into seven colour categories, with instructions to include at least one food from each colour group every day. Similarly, chapters in Mr. Joseph's book are divided by colour, and an eating plan includes a colour-scoring system that rates produce items by their disease-fighting abilities. Eating by colour is "definitely a gimmick," says Melanie Polk, director of nutrition education for the American Institute for Cancer Research. But aiming for multicoloured fruit salads or "throwing on every single colour you can think of as you walk around the salad bar," are ways consumers "can get more of a variety of protective substances," Ms. Polk said. It's "just another way to wrap your brain around this whole concept" of phytochemicals, agrees Laurie Deutsch Mozian, a Kingston, N.Y., dietician and author of "Foods That Fight Disease: A Simple Guide to Using and Understanding Phytonutrients to Protect and Enhance Your Health" (Avery). Three surveys show only small increases in fruit and vegetable consumption during the past decade (the average is now 3.4 servings a day) as well as in the proportion of the population (about 25 per cent) that is eating five or more servings a day, according a report issued in November by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Darcy Hall, a spokeswoman for the five-a-day programme, said research indicates that the top produce items Americans are eating are 1) French fries, 2) other potatoes and 3) iceberg lettuce. Not exactly a pigment-packed bunch. In addition, the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet trend continues to be strong, according to Marketdata Enterprises Inc., a Tampa market research company. While that regimen does not completely exclude fruits and vegetables, it emphasises monochromatic protein sources such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs and cheese. Still, colour proponents are hoping that Americans will opt for the rainbow approach. Vegetarian cookbook author Mollie Katzen ("The Moosewood Cookbook" and others) promotes the health benefits of "eat by colour" diets on her public television cooking series. After all, says Katzen, "it's a confluence of something that's beautiful, delicious - and good for you." L.A. Times-Washington Post
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