By Tracy Leonard-Turi, WEforum
We are so often bedazzled by supplements and elixirs because of what they contain, that we forget to ask the larger question: what are they missing? The venerable food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, once referred to frozen Milky Way bars as a culinary triumph, glumly dubbing salad the silent killer. His aversion to greens might have had something to do with an American culinary landscape once covered in brown, oxidized lettuce, usually of the iceberg variety. Once upon a time, if you wanted green you had to go for the neon green lime Jell-O.
Chlorophyll is a natural phytochemical that gives green plants their brilliant pigmentation. Plants absorb the sun’s energy, synthesizing it with water and carbon dioxide to manufacture the glucose they need to feed themselves, and leaving behind pure oxygen as a byproduct. This means that chlorophyll is also the ultimate air filter.
Chlorophyll is trending in 2019, touted for its health and wellness benefits, detoxifying properties and ability to produce radiant skin, so it‘s easy to forget that this isn’t the first time we’ve fallen in love with a green pigment. Remember Clorets gum and Palmolive dishwashing soap? During the 1950s, when TVs were first filling up American living rooms and Don Draper began honing his Mad Men skills, chlorophyll was heavily advertised as a cure for bad odors and the treatment of wounds and burns. Chlorophyll even ended up in deodorant, mouthwash, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, toothpaste, dog food, mothballs, candles, foot powders and toilet paper!
The science failed to support all of those shaky claims back then, and it still does today. But it’s not because chlorophyll isn’t important. When chlorophyll is extracted from green vegetables, key vitamins and minerals are left behind in the extraction process. Drinking an ounce of pre-packaged chlorophyll juice or adding it to your smoothie at breakfast might make you feel like that boost of magnesium and vitamin K is promoting bone and muscle health and also helping your blood clot, but feelings are often misleading. So what’s missing from that one-ounce liquid shot of processed food run-amok? Vitamins A, B, C and E, and minerals like iron, potassium and calcium, not to mention fiber, amino acids, antioxidants, and other phytochemicals that are left behind in the actual plant. It has also set you back around $4, or $1,460 per year!
Lean In Too Far, You Topple Over
Since the 1930s, advertisements and columns in women’s magazines have been telling us that we need to buy vitamins and enriched processed foods if we want to be good mothers and radiant wives. Past advice sometimes seems like borderline quackery by today’s standards, like that of pediatricians admonishing mothers to choose formula over breast milk because the science had surpassed what nature offered. Science has had an enormously positive impact on human history, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’d Like A Side of Lanolin And Coal Tar With My Processed Food, Please.
For those who eat lots of refined foods, the processed food and vitamin industries have also made us dependent on them for our nutrition. Refining destroys most of a food’s nutrients, so vitamins and minerals actually need to be pumped back in to them again to prevent us from becoming vitamin deficient. One of the original examples of this dates back to the early 19th century, to a sudden spike in a very painful and deadly disease called beriberi caused by severe thiamine deficiency. Scientists eventually determined that advanced machine milling techniques were stripping rice down to the white endosperm, robbing it of its thiamine content. Today we can easily enjoy our refined white (polished) rice without these same side effects, but only because it has been enriched with thiamine. Yet this is more problematic than it sounds because the raw materials for these synthetic vitamins that we now depend on are frequently extracted abroad, not from real food, but from odd sources, like coal tar, processed sorbitol, nylon waste, acetone, formaldehyde, and the lanolin from sheep’s wool.
When making any dietary decision, it is always important to seek professional medical advice, especially for those individuals with vitamin deficiencies or specific dietary needs who might benefit from added supplements. And prepackaged chlorophyll is most likely safe when consumed in moderation, and in consultation with a doctor or dietitian. But the many fresh, chlorophyll-rich, whole foods at our disposal today are a true gift. We don’t need to keep adding more processed foods to our lives.
Try these versatile recipes that incorporate chlorophyll-rich green, especially leafy, vegetables and herbs, seaweed, fruits like grapes and kiwi, and even nuts and seeds like pistachios and chia.
Price, C. (2016). Vitamania: How vitamins revolutionized the way we think about food. New York: Penguin Books.
