Throughput Nutrition: Phytonutrient Imperative That Counters Degenerative Diseases

In a groundbreaking series of articles two British researchers have made a convincing case for the introduction of supplements containing large quantities of phytonutrients. They reason that such preparations are far more important than commonly consumed multivitamin and mineral supplements. The researchers use a thorough analysis of the mid-Victorian, British working-class diet to back up their arguments and introduce us to the concept of "throughput nutrition".

In three meticulously researched articles published in recent editions of the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine, Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham compare Victorian England's working class diet to that of the modern western diet. They suggest that we should look to the former to help us tackle the plethora of degenerative diseases that plague modern society.

In contrast to long held beliefs the authors found that mid-19th century working class Britons had far healthier diets than scientists had previously believed. In fact their research has totally overturned a widely held misconception that the mid-Victorian working classes were unhealthy and undernourished.

The authors describe how even the urban-based working class consumed far higher quantities of fruit, vegetables and other plant foods than we do today.

The reasons that they were able to eat such a healthy diet are as follows:

1. Food in the urban areas became much more affordable because of a cheaper and more efficient transport infrastructure.

2. Laws that artificially kept up the cost of food were abolished.

3. Refined foods and sugar were still not widely available in the UK in the mid-1800s.

4. Cultivars of fruit and vegetables available 150 years ago almost certainly contained far higher levels of phytoprotective compounds than do modern plant varieties.

The mid-Victorians' excellent diet is reflected in the disease and mortality statistics of the time. If one excludes the childhood years (where infection claimed a large number of young lives) we see that life expectancy figures for that period are very similar to those of most developed countries today.

Once infant mortality figures are excluded the average life expectancy in mid-Victorian England was 74 years while currently it is approximately 78 years in developed countries.

Furthermore, the incidence of degenerative diseases was far lower in mid-Victorian England than it is now. Infection and injury were the commonest causes of death at that time while diseases like breast cancer, diabetes and atherosclerotic heart disease were uncommon.

THROUGHPUT NUTRITION

One of the most important factors unearthed by this research is that, in order to maintain adequate energy input, mid-Victorian workers needed to consume a 3500-4000 calories per day. Nowadays the average worker requires only half that amount.

Moreover there is a big difference in the dietary energy sources of the Victorian worker when compared to their counterparts over 100 years later. In Victorian times, energy input targets were achieved primarily by consuming large quantities of fruit and vegetables - while today we rely mostly on refined food and fat for our energy needs.

The consumption of large quantities of fruit and vegetables by those British workers is very significant when one looks at the low incidences of degenerative diseases that occurred during the mid-Victorian era. Clayton and Rowbotham attribute this to the exceptionally high levels of phytonutrients and other phytoprotective compounds that were ingested as a part of the high calorie throughput that characterized the diet of the time.

With these facts in mind they go on to outline a new concept called throughput nutrition. Inter alia throughput nutrition is a nutritional imperative where, in order to obtain sufficient quantities of protective phytonutrients, we need to consume large quantities of fruit, vegetables and other un-refined plant foods.

In order to obtain sufficient quantities of protective compounds that these foods provide we need to maintain a minimum daily throughput of health-promoting plant foods

The authors show that the mid-Victorian workers were eating such high quantities of fruit and vegetables that they were ingesting "pharmacological" doses of many protective plant based compounds.

They argue that we really do need to ingest very high levels of plant-based antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic and other compounds if we are serious about reducing the massive pandemic of degenerative diseases that afflict modern societies.

The problem, as they see it, is that most of us do not do enough physical work to justify the consumption of over 3500 calories of food per day. Furthermore, most of the foods we would eat to maintain a similar calorific intake could not give the same quantities of protective phytonutrients that the mid-Victorian diet provided.

Instead, they suggest that we formulate supplements and functional foods to provide those protective compounds without having to consume unnecessary calories. By doing this we will gain the enormous benefits of throughput nutrition and avoid aggravating the obesity pandemic.

Fortunately there are already a number of innovative supplements that do provide a wide range of phytonutrients. The spice-based phytonutrients in these supplements have been shown scientifically to help prevent heart disease, cancer, macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases.