The Additive Principle of Nutrition

[writerkit]

I have discovered the idea of additive nutrition and I'm finding it really helpful.

Most of American food culture runs on the idea of subtractive nutrition-- the idea is to eliminate all the bad things from your diet. The problem is that this leads to people just... not eating, because they're not interested in the "healthy" food left to them. (This is in fact what happens every time I decide I'm going to Eat Healthy-- I pretty much stop eating for a week and then remember why this is a bad idea.)

Additive nutrition focuses on adding the healthy food without much caring what else you're doing. According to subtractive nutrition, if you're eating carrots with ranch dip, you shouldn't eat it because of the ranch dip; you should just eat the carrots. Which usually results in not eating the carrots either. Additive nutrition goes "yay, you ate carrots!"

So yes, I'm eating mac and cheese that came out of a box. And I dumped broccoli and homemade meatballs into it; it's fine. Though the place where this comes up the most is if I'm spreading almond butter and nutella on my breakfast toast, yay, there was almond butter.

On a completely unrelated note, what is the point of owning a cookbook called How to Cook Everything if it contains nothing on chicken hearts? (Or at least nothing in the index; I admit I have not read it thoroughly.) It's the revised and expanded edition, even! I have plenty of cookbooks for the more common things; I want my cooking encyclopedias to give me instructions on the less common things. Joy of Cooking would have had it, I'm sure. I really need to track down what happened to my copy of that, or find my mother's.

Comments

[squirrelitude]

There's another way to factor it, which is to ask: Are low-nutrition calories displacing high-nutrition calories from my diet? (Pretending for a moment that carbs are not nutrients, which is fine in the context of the standard American diet.)

If I'm eating primarily junk food and then I add healthy food on top, I'm probably getting the right nutrients but too much carbs. If I replace some of the junk food with healthy stuff, rather than adding on, then that probably works.

My current approach is to stick to three rules: Limit how much I eat overall in a day, specifically limit how much sugary stuff I eat, and always eat at least one large helping of good whole-seed protein like millet, lentils, tempeh, etc. with some kind of fresh or fermented vegetables. Then I basically snack the rest of the time, usually on fats and more complex carbs (e.g. corn chips, PB sandwiches, etc.) It probably shakes out OK.

Critical to this has been a habit of pre-making certain reasonably-healthy things to snack on. :-)

I think the concept of "displacement" is pretty important, and apparently it's essential for the elderly, who have increased nutrient needs but tend to eat fewer calories overall -- "each calorie needs to be more nutritious" is what I've heard said.

[squirrelitude]

(Little of this is relevant for people who aren't struggling with reducing overall calories, of course. If that's not an issue, then additive is probably a great framing just by itself!)

[writerkit]

See, that's actually still too much for people like me. The approach I outlined is how you get to people for whom *any* attempt at monitoring subtraction, including replacement, is going to trigger a scrupolosity spiral. From a simple appetite standpoint, if you're managing to do adding you're probably doing some replacement (toast with almond butter nutella is more filling than toast with regular butter and it takes longer to be hungry again), but I cannot think about it in terms of "am I getting too much carbs" because that's how I wind up back in not-eating-at-all land.