How Important is Food Variety?
I eat a pretty monotonous diet. I’m not averse to new foods or cuisines, and I’ll try just about anything, but my regular, day-to-day food is consistent and reliable. Check out a week in my life if you don’t believe me. Breakfast is either coffee, Primal Fuel, and/or an omelet. Lunch is usually a Big Ass Salad. Dinner consists of a meat/fish, something green, and a glass of wine. Occasionally, I’ll throw in some sweet potatoes, macadamia nuts, or berries, and if I eat out or have guests over I’ll mix things up, but that’s essentially it. I like the food I like, it keeps me satisfied and fueled, and it’s nutritionally complete. It’s also one less thing to worry about in an increasingly busy life.
I think most people have go-to meals, especially in the Primal community, where cooking the bulk of one’s meals oneself to avoid Neolithic poisons is the norm. You get comfortable with a certain range of dishes, you buy the same stuff at the market, you perfect your technique, and you’ve had success with these dishes in the past… so why change? It’s also not very realistic to whip up new dishes every single day, dishes that require this amount of some random spice or obscure vegetable that you’d never use for anything else. Cooking big complex meals is fun for a change, but it’s not realistic for everyday eating. This is true all across the world and, I imagine, across history. People have always had staples that they stick to, especially if they cook most of their own food – as mankind has done for most of its history.
But “monotony” is kind of a bad word. To many, it means boring, unfulfilling, onerous, and miserable. We in the Primal community often mention the “monotony of Chronic Cardio” as a detraction, so I’m not exempt. We like dynamic movement that passes through all three planes and uses multiple joints. We often speak of “fractals” and randomness, like choosing to walk across an uneven landscape or skipping meals just because. So, on the face of it, food variety seems like a natural extension of the Primal lifestyle.
And for the most part, I support food variety. There are clear benefits to eating a wider variety of foods:
- Access to a wider variety of micronutrients and phytochemicals. Think of all the various antioxidants associated with the greens, reds, yellows, purples, and oranges in fruits and vegetables. Think of how vitamin and mineral content differs between foods.
- Dilution of food toxins. Food toxins usually operate in a dose-dependent manner, so keeping a variety would help keep the doses low and spread thin.
- Food enjoyment. Eating the same three things is a sure path to food boredom. Eating should come with a serving of sensory enjoyment.
Let’s take a deeper look at that food boredom thing. People like novelty, and food boredom is a horrible, horrible thing that certainly leads to bad food choices. I mean, who’s more likely to crumple and go for the vegetable oil sugar fritters (also known as donuts) – the guy who eats the same Big Ass Salad every single day or the guy who can’t stop talking about the latest Senegalese/Burmese/Ukrainian joint he hit for dinner last night? You might guess the salad-eater, since he couldn’t possibly enjoy eating the same thing over and over again, because, well, it just seems so boring and variety is the spice of life! The guy with berbere under his fingernails is surely immune to the allure of a novel industrial food-like substance, given his cosmopolitan appetites.
Let’s use a little logic here. Salad guy is an adult with the ability to procure or prepare the food of his choice. If he so wished, he too could be the guy who insists on ordering “Thai spicy.” Instead, he eats that same salad every single day. He chooses to eat that same salad every day. To me, that suggests not food boredom, but food contentment. Big difference. Boredom’s bad, contentment is great. The adventurous guy seems a bit bored, to be honest. Maybe not bored, but perhaps boredom is lapping at his heels and he’s doing all he can to keep it at bay.
Contentment and boredom appear similar to an observer, but they’re really not. Boredom is a projection, not a description. Because a daily salad would bore the onlooker, he or she assumes the salad eater is bored. To the salad guy, the daily salad is a beautiful, satiating thing. It’s like that “boring couple” we all know. They’re boring homebodies, but they’re probably content. Besides, who knows what kind of sexual escapades are going on?
Food contentment is really another word for habituation, which can actually be quantitatively measured in humans via salivary response to food. Yep, it’s not just dogs who subconsciously drool at the sight of food. Humans do it, too. So, by measuring the salivary response, we can gauge whether someone is habituated to a particular food. And obese and overweight people do not habituate to food as quickly as normal weight individuals. In one study, when presented with lemon-flavored candies, both normal weight people and successful weight loss retainers (former overweight/obese who lost and maintained) showed quick habituation, i.e. they stopped salivating after a few candies. Obese people did not show habituation. Their salivation did not cease or slow down. Their bodies craved that lollipop every time it was offered. You might think that it’s a genetic thing, that folks with the “non-habituation gene” are more likely to get fat, but the fact that the former obese all showed quick habituation makes that unlikely. It’s more likely that obesity changes our ability to habituate.
There’s another option, of course. It could be that a failure to habituate to food helps cause obesity, that if a food remains novel, we eat more of it. So, it’s not that obesity leads to non-habituation, but the other way around. If so, we’d need to understand how food habituation breaks down and why. Perhaps this recent study of food habituation in obese and normal weight women can help: both obese and non-obese women aged 20-50 years were broken up into two groups. One group received macaroni and cheese once a day for five days straight. The other group received macaroni and cheese one day a week for five weeks. Same amount of mac and cheese, different schedule. The five-days-straight group showed long-term habituation to the mac and cheese. They craved and ate less of it by the end of the trial. The second group ate more mac and cheese and showed very little habituation. Mac and cheese remained a novel food to the second group, while it was standard fare for the first group, even though both groups had access to the same amount of mac and cheese. The only thing that changed was meal frequency. You might say that the second group ate a more varied diet, while the first group ate a more monotonous diet.
Keeping frequency constant but changing the food also seems to affect habituation. Another study found that limiting snacks to a single variety increased the satiety derived from snacking, as opposed to participants who were allowed to snack on a variety of foods. Both groups received the same amount of snacks, but the no-variety group could choose only a single snack to receive for the duration of the study, while the variety group could get a different snack every time.
There’s also epidemiological evidence that food variety is associated with being overweight. One study looked at long term weight loss maintainers, or former obese folks who were able to successfully keep the weight off for years, and found that the most successful maintainers ate a diet very low in food variety when compared to folks who had just recently lost weight.
Does all that suggest eating a wide variety of Primal-approved foods will inevitably lead to obesity?
No. Consider that we are an odd bunch, and study groups do not accurately reflect us. We are, for the most part, eating, moving, and living uniquely. We’re not on this study’s control diet of refined grains and hot dogs or that study’s experimental diet of whole grains and low-fat dairy. They might provide interesting clues into general human metabolism, but that’s about it. We don’t eat crap in a box. Our idea of food variety isn’t having Pringles, Doritos, Bugles, and Kettle Chips in the pantry. When you limit choices to real food, variety doesn’t matter so much. One study found that overall food variety correlated positively with body fatness in urban Hong Kong Chinese adults, but that correlation reversed itself when limited to “meat and grain” variety. Adding “snack variety” to the mix flipped it to a positive correlation. So, eating a wide variety of snack food was associated with increased body fat, while a wide variety of real food (sure, whole grains aren’t ideal, but as studies have repeatedly shown, they’re better than refined, processed snacks and grain-derived snacks) was associated with lower body fat.
Snacks, mac and cheese? These do not a Primal eating plan comprise.
The question remains, then: should a diet be highly variable?
It depends on your definition of variety. Primal variety means eating organ meat, shellfish, muscle meat, and using the bones. It means rotating between kale, chard, and spinach. It means paying attention to colorful vegetation (use that color vision), like blueberries, cherries, Okinawan sweet potatoes, and carrots. It does not mean getting Chinese take out today and deep dish pizza tomorrow.
It needn’t be super exciting and variable. All that stuff up above is to show that there is nothing wrong with liking the food you like, and, as I showed a few weeks ago, you can satisfy your nutritional and hedonistic requirements with just ten foods. There’s nothing wrong with being the salad guy, or the meat-and-sweet-potatoes type. Variety for the sake of variety is mostly useless, nutritionally, and taken to the extreme might even lead to poor choices and weight gain. Just enjoy your food and eat plenty of plants and animals. As long as you make sure what you eat comes from the Earth, not from a lab or a food production facility, whether you enjoy a variety or a monotone meal plan is immaterial.
The key is that you enjoy it.
What about you, dear readers? Is variety important to you, or do you happily maintain a regular and consistent meal plan?
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
My menu has definitely devolved: I’ve gone from a wide variety of modern foods to steaks cooked in tallow and/or topped with butter, usually with sauteed mushrooms. Eggs fried in tallow or ghee; small-sized berry smoothies, usually with a bit of coconut oil or MCT oil. (All animal fats are from grass-fed beasties.) Boiled down to the essentials: meat, eggs, and berries. (I often add raw egg yolks and/or whey proteins to the smoothies.)
I’ve tried Big Assed Salads, smoothies with a variety of vegetation, etc., but leaves and twigs just give me intestinal problems. I do occasionally eat an avocado with my almost raw (very over-easy) eggs but that’s about it.
I have had several people tell me that is an unhealthy way to eat but it works for me. I have plenty of energy, I sleep very well and I exercise well. In fact, in just the past ten days, I lost six pounds of body fat. (I know it’s fat lost, as opposed to water loss, because I finally got below that point where my clothes are now too damned loose and I have to spend some hard-earned money to re-clothe myself. I’m not whining, mind you, but it is still a pain in the ass.)
I figure ol’ Grok, if he lived in the mid-continent, far away from the coast, probably had a fairly monotonous menu: buffalo parts and pieces for breakfast, buffalo pieces and parts for lunch, and buffalo steaks for supper. That’s a simplification I know, but you get my drift.
I found PB when I found out I was allergic to a list of foods a half a mile long(some I am glad of lie wheat and soy and some not so much like spinach, most nuts, and peaches) so yes my list of foods I eat is pretty short but what I do with them is longer. I love to cook and try new recipes and since I have lost 81 pounds since going primal and I am under 300 pounds for the first time since the 4th grade, I guess it’s working for me so if it’s not broke don’t fix it as they say. I eat omelets for breakfast or protein shakes depends on my mood that day and then salads or proteins for lunch and then dinner is veggies and meat (mostly chicken I am allergic to beef) sometimes I have snacks sometimes I don’t depends on the day.
I think there is some misunderstanding here about what variety of foods means. For instance you take the potatoe and say I eat potatoes as part of my diet, most people are referring to the standard strain of brown tomatoes we are used to, most people do not know that there used to be as little as 40 years ago over 20 different types of potatoes. Most strains of vegetables and fruits, have been commercially phased out, because 1-3 strains were the easiest to maintain and mass produce and the others fell to the side. So the concept of being content with the food choices you make on a daily basis, discounts the fact that those choices have been unnecessarily limited. If you like to always eat potatoes, that is great, but there was a time that choosing a potatoes had so much variety in and of itself!
One thing that I think is hilarious is how a lot of people think they are eating a varied diet, when it is really just a myriad permutations of corn, wheat, and soybeans. Eating salad and meat every single day, though superficially monotonous, is inherently a far more diverse diet that the SAD.
I’m actually fine with just meat, eggs and cottage cheese for now and have been for about 3 weeks now. I’m glad I haven’t gotten bored with it because I’ve lost 10 pounds and 2 inches off my waist!
ahhh another topic of great interest to me. Somewhere on the Kurt Harris “archevore” blog he makes a comment (I can’t find it now and I hope I’m not taking it too far out of context) about how simple his diet is. I was viewing my very limited diet as boring. (I eat a version of primal called “fodmap”, which controls IBS for me). There are so many foods I cannot eat. But when I read Harris, I really started to view it differently. It’s a simple diet, not boring. Simple and good. Like pulling on jeans and a t-shirt every morning. And sometimes one can get dressed up when the effort is worthwhile.
I dont eat much variety at all. Good meat, fish, and eggs, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, tomatoes, garlic, onion and some berries and nuts.
I think we humans can survive on a lot less variety than we think.
Hi Mark,
An important ad on, good food is never boring when you’re hungry, my colleagues at work ask me if I am not bored with chicken? bet no one would be bored with chicken in Belsen
Nice post man, I’m diggin the “Big Ass Salad” idea, LOL. Good stuff tho, really like your site, you have tons of great information here. Keep up the awesome work!
I think a really interesting little thought experiment would be to log the number of distinct subspecies Primal eaters eat over a given time compared to non-primal eaters. I strongly suspect that whilst we eat stuff which looks the same a lot of the time, we’re actually eating a much broader variety of food sources than non-primal eaters who are I’d suspect getting their many different types of food from the same few basic ingredients. Personally speaking I try to mix it up as much as possible within the basic same positions – the greens on my evening meal for example could be shop bought spinach, cabbage, asparagus etc or foraged wild leaves (NB – foraging is cool and one of the ultimate primal mild effort activities IMO) or home grown Orac or Horseradish greens. Variety is definitely the spice of life but there’s more than one way to define variety.
Hey there,
I have my eggs each morning, sveggies and meat at lunch and definately meat for dinner. Not much of a variety, but it’s perfectly working for me.
Greets from Bulgaria!
A.
i eat ‘seasonally monotonously’. in summer lots of fish, chicken, salads and stone fruits. in winter lots of red meat, root vegies, eggs. don’t like salad in winter and don’t like soup in summer
natural variety…
Lets face it, variety like we are accustomed to has only been available for 50-100 years, before that we were restricted to everything that we could source locally. Going through the seasons only certain things were available so it wouldn’t do for us to be constantly in search of strawberries in the depths of winter (I’m from Scotland), that would be caloric expenditure that we couldn’t afford.
I used to think variety was important, but as I have became more interested in fitness meals have lost their appeal to me. I find myself only concerned about meeting my protein and carb intakes as well as watching my micronutrients.
I have a BAS daily and no two salads have ever been the same. I vary the type of veggies, nuts, lettuce, dressing. I don’t see how anyone can hate salads. The challenge I have is always making two things: one for me and my husband, and one for my three small children. I WISH, but can’t expect, them to eat egg white omelettes, salads, and meat with more vegetables every day. I do let them have fun with a little mac and cheese every now and then. Someday…
I eat the same foods almost every day. Even when I go out to eat, I still order the same thing I always order, not because I don’t want to try something new, but because I enjoy my usual meal
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Mark I love all the information you provide here, since I’ve been reading your blog, I’ve learned so much more than from my fitness study guide.
Modern monotonous eating is really all about convenience. As Tim Ferriss says in his 4 Hour Body book, “there are 47 000 products in the average supermarket, but only a handful of them won’t make you fat”. So I think that once you settle on a few which you seem comfortable with and don’t produce any adverse results you get into the habit of eating the same foods, over and over again. After all it’s one less thing to think about.
However, food variety is essential as the nutrients necessary to meet nutritional requirements are not all found in a single food item (with the exception of human breast milk in the first months of life) but come from a diet composed of a number of foods. Nutrition scientists have identified about 12 000 compounds (called phytochemicals) that play a role in preventing disease. As many of these compounds work together, it makes sense to eat a wide variety of foods. As such, diverse diets have been shown to protect against chronic diseases such as cancer, as well as being associated with prolonged longevity and improved health.
If you consider the food choices of our ancestors, local biodiversity coupled with seasonal variations would have given rise to the availability of a huge range of plants, fruits, seeds, fungi, nuts, etc and their diets would have been full of changes throughout the year. Factor in fish and the animals they’ll have hunted down and eaten too and you’ve got lots of different dietary components.
But beware! I’ve noticed that you tend to eat more food during a meal which consists of a variety of foods presented in a succession of courses than during a meal with only a single type of food, even if it is your favourite!
Im like Mark…I know what I eat..I have a simple menu..I dont need to hide/or fancy it up ..And Im never bored because I think primal..and that means simple/fresh/and edible…It just goes with my territory>>>>>>
Variety is definitely important to me because I get bored easily. I try to eat a food cuisine from a different culture every day at lunch partly because I work near a city and there are more choices. One day I would salad, another day eat Indian food, then Chinese and Mexican and so on.
Breakfast is more difficult because I hardly have time to eat. But I try to switch different fruits such as grapes, pineapples, berries, etc for breakfast.
I am also a pretty simple eater; I buy the same veggies, fruit and meat every week at the grocery store. I can eat left overs for two days in a row or more sometimes. I eat the same thing for breakfast pretty much every day.
My husband is also a simple eater; while he isn’t primal, he does eat the same things every day. I agree that it is so much easier to cook what I know how to cook and what I know I will like; I save the culinary adventures for when I have the time and energy!
I eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast and lunch everyday. I basically have a few go to foods for each of those meals and will rotate them out every other day. This helps to create the illusion of variety, but i am perfectly happy with the same food each day. It makes it a lot easier to know what im taking in without really having to think about it.
I skimmed the above comments, so apologies if someone already said this, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading reports about super-annuated humans (people who lived to be 100+ years) and the one commonality they all had was ROUTINE.
Same activities every day, same exercise routine every day, to bed the same time every night, and yes, same foods year/in year out.
Of course the variety of those foods may widen or narrow with individual tastes, but it’s still an interesting consideration. Since our bodies have to repopulate gut bacteria to accommodate what we eat, might we be wearing out the digestive system faster by eating extreme varieties of food?
(P.S.–I specifically remember one old man saying he never ever ate dinner, and swore it was the secret to his long life and health–IF, anyone?)
Hey Mark! I am in total agreement with the concept of habitual eating. Every week I pick up 3 pounds of Chicken breast and thigh, 1 pound of Asparagus, 2 pounds of Zucchini and maybe some spinach as well. My question is this…Would Grok be satisfied (Nutritionally) with this diet? It could not have been as easy to get variety as we can in his day. He had no Farmers Market. Is it possible that American Grok ate Kale and European Grok ate Swiss Chard? Anyone else feel free to comment, I am curious
I wonder if we crave so much variety on our plates because our lives have become boring in other areas? I love to cook and experiment in the kitchen,but when I don’t have the time,I can eat the same rotation of 6-8 meals and be quite satisfied and content. When I’m less excited about some areas of my life,I tend to feel disatified with my plate. The creativity in all of us has to go somewhere. I’m not suggesting that we abandon our culinary creativity,I’m just coming to realize how much I’ve changed my life and no longer feel my food has to be amazing,unique and gourmet.The rest of my life has gotten so interesting lately,that I really like the routine of the regular meal rotation. I know I’m feeding my body the best nutrition I can and look to other areas of my life to excite and stimulate me.
None of these studies were done on subjects who were Primal, so as Mark pointed out, I think the applicability is limited. I think they tell us very little about those of us who are eating in a way that is copecetic with thier genetic/evolutionary make-up. Most of us tend to keep unhealthy cravings at bay if we’ve been at this for a while.
If you like variety, go for it–there’s plenty to be had in the Primal community. If not, meh–Primal-approved foods, for the most part, are nutritionally dense enough to keep you healthy–so do what you like, I say.
I’ve found that I can pre-cook a batch of chicken breast or whatever other meat I want and prep it in separate containers with some oil/homemade creme fraiche and a huge variety of seasonings. I’ve never in my life had such a varied diet, the flavors change based on the type of fat and the type of seasoning I use. I love it!
food variety is very important
I am glad you brought up the term “content” vs boring. I am very content with my limited food choices and I really enjoy the consistency. Usually, after about a month of the same ol same ol I will move onto a new consistent pattern so I have a bit of variety but after a longer time frame. I also make an attempt at “color” anytime I go out to eat so I get my spice of variety (and probably preventing cancer too!)
I have just found out about stabilized rice bran, and tried it to-day. very easy to take and the claimes about it sound too good to be true. any comments
Alternating the various food types will help in achieving good health.