Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It

Another good article on healthy eating, community gardens, growing your own and more leafy green vegetables from Tom Philpott at MoJo (Mother Jones online). This, along with gardening tips, other community gardens, growing your own, locavore and other "green" topics have become regular features. "Eat Healthy" or "Eat Healthy because..." seems like a good name for this one.

While Big Food rams its Tater Tots and frozen pizza school lunch agenda through Congress, we're learning more about the effects of diets high in starchy foods and low in green vegetables. And it's not pretty.

[MoJo columnist, Tom Philpott] pointed yesterday to a vast recent Harvard study finding that heavy consumption of potatoes—even in non-fried forms—leads to unhealthy weight gain. Now, from UK scientists, comes a study (press release here; abstract here) suggesting that green vegetables may have even more dietary importance than we previously thought. (Hat tip Atlantic Life.) The researchers subjected mice to a diet stripped of vegetables, and found that after just three weeks, the mice lost 70 to 80 percent of a kind of white blood cell called intra-epithelial lymphocytes (IELs), which, the press release states, "play a critical role in monitoring the large number of micro-organisms present in the intestine, keeping infections at bay and maintaining a healthy gut."

The researchers posit that a substance known as indole-3-carbinol, prominent in leafy greens, is responsible for maintaining these white blood cells. Take it out of the diet, apparently, and the cells die. Here's a graphical depiction of their findings:

Image: Babraham Institute

One of the researchers, Marc Veldhoen, remarked that, "since the new diet contained all other known essential ingredients such as minerals and vitamins,” the results surprised him. But .... [f]oodstuffs are complex .... Whole foods interact with our bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Read the rest of Tom Philpott's Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It and follow his column at MoJo (Mother Jones online)