Eating in Vibrant Color
The natural colors in food are screaming their value at us. We need to listen.
Of all the holistic health issues I’ve followed in the past several years, one has held my attention: the nutritional significance of the natural colors in food.
Holistic health and longevity expert David Avocado Wolfe introduced this subject to me in 2015. Ever since, I’ve been filtering my food through a different prism, so to speak, and I think I’m better off for it.
Essentially, Wolfe says the natural water- and oil-soluble pigments that give food their color are anti-oxidants and other beneficial substances. They help to keep the body lithe and limber; strengthen the organs; nourish the brain; foster healthy digestion and elimination of toxins; and bolster vitality and overall well-being. In fact, the pigments may be the most significant components of food, he says.
Takeaways
1. The natural colors in food signal how the food will nourish us.
2. Each color corresponds to pigments with a set of beneficial properties.
3. Taking heed of the colors can help us make easier—and wise(r)—food choices.
Equally fascinating for me is that Wolfe says each color group corresponds to a predictable and consistent set of healthful properties. For example, orange pigments (e.g., curcumin) are anti-inflammatory, while green pigments (e.g., chlorophyll) are detoxifying, he says. Further, each individual pigment has a distinctive molecular geometrical shape, ranging from simple (yellow pigments) to increasingly sophisticated and symmetrical. The most complexly structured pigments (purples and blues) may be the most beneficial to us, he says.
“The color is your cure.”
Wolfe considers all of this proof of an organizing principle in nature, since these observations are universal. Accordingly, he says there’s no need to master the nutritional details of the fruits and vegetables—or the mushrooms, beans, grains, grasses, herbs, nuts, and, if applicable, the animal proteins—we consume. Instead, Wolfe says we should let the food’s colors guide us.
“The color is your cure,” said Wolfe at a longevity conference in Anaheim, Calif., in April 2018. That’s a straightforward message any five-year-old child can understand just as well as any 50-year-old adult, he says. After all, there’s nothing more obvious about food than its color, he says.
Stock photo courtesy of 123rf.com. Michael Sirak added the text.
Pure Code
To be clear, it’s the color of the part of the food that we eat that matters. For example, Wolfe says, consider a banana a white food, not a yellow one. (That is, of course, unless you eat the yellow peel along with the white inner flesh. Some people do that.)
The natural pigments—often intensely bright, brilliant, vivid, and alluring—are “a pure code of what the food does” for the body, Wolfe told a forum in June 2015 in upstate New York. That was the first time I heard him speak on this topic. Over the course of the next three-plus years, I intently listened as he discussed the food pigments at events I attended across the United States. Each time, I gleaned more insights and sensed, too, that Wolfe’s own understanding was maturing as his research grew.
“Green on the inside means clean on the inside.”
Based on his research, Wolfe describes the pigments in this way (there’s also a list at the end of this article with more detail):
Yellow pigments (e.g., resveratrol) boost the immune system, support cellular growth, and help the body build and repair tissue. They are the most common in nature—there are literally thousands of them, says Wolfe. For example, the pigment quercetin is “in every fruit and vegetable, no exceptions,” he said at a seminar in western Massachusetts in June 2016. Yellow pigments have the simplest molecular structures and, thus, are easiest for nature to produce, he says.
Orange pigments (e.g., beta carotene, curcumin) fight inflammation and support the body’s movement. Wolfe says they help to foster “happiness in action.”
Red pigments (e.g., astaxanthin, lycopene) strengthen the heart, build blood, and generate energy. Notably, just like fire, red foods can cause us to be volatile (e.g., irritated), if we eat too many of them at once, says Wolfe.
Green pigments (e.g., chlorophyll) detoxify and deodorize the body and cleanse the liver. “Green on the inside means clean on the inside,” said Wolfe at a longevity event in Anaheim in October 2016. Chlorophyll is the dominant pigment in nature, he says. Depending on where you live, just look outside for confirmation of that. Chlorophyll is water-soluble and valuable for removing heavy metals from the body, he says.
Brown pigments (e.g., proanthocyanidins) support the digestive tract and help to keep a person’s bowels moving regularly.
White pigments—yes, there are white pigments (e.g., anthoxanthins)—support the lungs, including clearing mucous, and boost the immune system, especially during seasonal transitions, says Wolfe. They can play an important role for someone whose health has been severely impaired, since that person may not be able to tolerate other food types, says Wolfe. I can attest to this: When I recently had a health scare, steamed organic cauliflower was one of my food staples as I began to eat again.
Black pigments (e.g., melanin) support the bone marrow and kidneys and feed our long-term supply of energy.
Purple pigments (e.g., anthocyanins) protect the central nervous system and nourish the brain and eyes.
Blue pigments (e.g., phycocyanin) feed bone marrow, support stem-cell production and neurological defenses, and nourish the throat and thyroid. Since they feed our very core—the marrow—it is so important to eat foods like blue-green algae and vibrant-blue berries, he says. Blue pigments have the most sophisticated molecular structure and are the most difficult for nature to create, making them the smallest group by far, says Wolfe. “They are really, really rare,” he said on a January 2017 episode of the Ultimate Health Podcast. In fact, he noted that he had been able to identify only about 10 in his research up to that point.
Across the Spectrum
Wolfe says we need all colors in our diet. One reason is that pigments across the color spectrum protect the body from radiation, said Wolfe at the 2016 Massachusetts seminar. For example, yellow, orange, and red pigments help to shield us from high levels of ultraviolet light, while blue and purple pigments safeguard us from high infrared radiation levels, he said.
Wolfe admits to being partial to foods like heirloom cacao beans. That’s because they are rich in purple, brown, and black pigments, forming “a very powerful combination for longevity,” he said at the Massachusetts event.
Heirloom cacao beans are a top food to eat for longevity because they contain deep-purple, -brown, and -black pigments, says holistic health and longevity expert David Avocado Wolfe.
By the time of that seminar, Wolfe said he had already gone through some 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies on the natural pigments in food as part of a book he was writing. More on that later.
Correlations between a food’s color and its value to the body have existed for thousands of years in Chinese herbalism and other belief systems, said Wolfe in Anaheim in April 2018. Such thinking, he noted, also is reflected today in sayings like “We need foods with golden colors during our ‘golden years’.”
Nonetheless, until I heard Wolfe discussing this, I was not aware of the food colors’ significance. Neither my high school health class, nor any food pyramid I ever saw in my youth mentioned this. While Wolfe is the only person whom I’ve heard go into detail on this topic, I subsequently learned he’s not alone among holistic health experts in highlighting the pigments’ importance.
“The health benefits of fruits and vegetables, a lot of them have to do with these pigments,” said Dr. Andrew Weil, a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine (i.e., a healing-oriented approach to health care that encompasses body, mind, and spirit) during a December 2018 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “Across any day, try to eat across the color spectrum. That’s a good thing to aim for,” he said. “Brightly colored stuff is good.”
Interestingly, Rogan, who is quite knowledgeable about health issues, didn’t seem to be aware of the pigments’ nutritional significance. The fact that many people are ignorant of this connection reflects the anti-intuitive nature of current Western thinking, said Wolfe on the Ultimate Health Podcast. “This is very symptomatic of the way we do science, which is backwards,” he said. Instead of investigating the colors in food, which are obvious, Western science opted to investigate food’s other, more-complex properties, he said.
Class Acts
There are various classes of pigments. For example, flavonoids (e.g., kaempferol, luteolin, quercetin) are a group of common fruit and vegetable pigments. They come in every color, but green, says Wolfe.
Another class, carotenoids (e.g., astaxanthin, beta-carotene, lycopene), comprises fat-soluble pigments that mostly come in yellow, orange, and red. Carotenoids are found mostly in water-soluble vegetables, but are also in some fruits like mangos. Eating carotenoid-rich foods with oil (e.g., avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil) will enable the body to absorb more of these pigments before they pass out of the body, says Wolfe.
Anthocyanins (e.g., cyanidin, malvidin, petunidin), a sub-set of flavonoids, are nutrient-dense pigments in some fruits, vegetables, and herbs. They give these foods brilliant deep-red, purple, and blue hues. Blackberries contain up to six times as much anthocyanins as blueberries, notes Wolfe.
Another group, betalains (e.g., betanin, indicaxanthin, phyllocactin), consists of water-soluble pigments that quickly benefit the body after ingestion (i.e., they are “highly bio-available”). Betalains are found in hearty fruits and vegetables (e.g., amaranth, beet, cacti, chard, quinoa, spinach). Wolfe considers the betalain-rich red juice from the saguaro cactus fruit to be the best sunscreen of all. Drinking it provides the body with the skin-protecting pigments readily, he says. One drawback of betalain-rich foods is they also contain oxalic acid, which in large amounts can manifest as kidney stones in some people, says Wolfe.
“The health benefits of fruits and vegetables, a lot of them have to do with these pigments.”
Chlorophyll falls in the class of water-soluble porphyrin pigments. Notably, Wolfe says, four carotenoid pigments always accompany chlorophyll. As the chlorophyll breaks down, for example in a kale leaf, the carotenoid colors will show, he says. The other pigments always were there; they just were not visible before, he says.
Chlorella has the highest concentration of chlorophyll of any green food; 10 percent of chlorella’s makeup is chlorophyll, says Wolfe. Compare that to just 0.25 percent for wheat grass and 0.2 percent for parsley, he notes.
The blue pigment phycocyanin is a type of light-harvesting protein found in spirulina and blue-green algae. Along with supporting stem-cell production and nourishing bone marrow, it is a pre-eminent liver detoxifier, says Wolfe.
Nature has only a small amount of blue pigments because they are difficult to produce, says Wolfe. What nature often does is “fool” us into thinking objects are blue, such as bird feathers, butterfly wings—even the sky and oceans—when they are not. These objects refract light in manner that makes them appear blue. The term for nature’s deception is “structural coloration.”
Medicinal Dose
In some cases, it’s not just the foods we eat, but how we prepare them that determines whether we’ll reap the greatest benefit from their pigments, says Wolfe. Tomatoes, for example, contain the carotenoid lycopene, which he calls “an extraordinary blood builder.” If we eat a tomato raw, our body will absorb less than five percent of the lycopene, he says. However, if we puree the tomato, we double the absorption rate, he says. (In fact, blending any food generally doubles the body’s absorption of the pigments, says Wolfe).
If we then add oil (e.g., olive oil), the absorption rate climbs to some 40 percent, he says. And, if we heat the tomato-olive oil mix to around 118 degrees Fahrenheit, our bodies will be able to absorb 60 percent of the lycopene, he says. (Wolfe describes that temperature as a level of heat at which we’d have to blow on the food to cool it before putting it in our mouths). Interestingly, as the temperature goes down, so does the absorption rate of the lycopene, says Wolfe.
Speaking at the 2016 Massachusetts seminar, Wolfe said absorbing such high levels of lycopene is akin to “a medicinal dose” of the pigment, which can have powerful immunological effects for us over the course of several days. That approach is important especially when a person’s food options are restricted due to limited access to wholesome foods. Stated differently: We need to know these types of hacks to yield more nutritional value out of those foods to which we do have access.
“They [blue pigments in nature] are really, really rare.”
Colors are also telling in animal proteins, says Wolfe. For example, darker meat in poultry is more nutritious, he says. Vibrant orange egg yolks are better than sterile-looking yellow ones, and the salmon we eat should be a rich orange and not a pale gray, he says.
When discussing colors in foods, Wolfe likes to point out a stinging irony of nature: Above the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem grows the Thorny Caper plant. Like other species in the caper family, it has one of the highest concentrations of any plant of the yellow pigment quercetin. Like other yellow pigments, quercetin’s anti-oxidant properties contribute to our well-being and happiness, says Wolfe. Thus, one of nature’s “happiest” foods hangs right above the people who come to the Wailing Wall to pray and “mourn” the loss of the Second Temple, yet none of the wall’s visitors seemingly realizes this.
Those of you who follow Wolfe know that he completed the book on the pigments in food, which he had provisionally titled “The Color Cure.” At the time of its preparation, Wolfe said it would be “the first-ever” book to compile information on every pigment in nature. His publisher ultimately opted to defer bringing this work to market in favor of releasing Wolfe’s most-recent book, “The Beauty Diet,” that hit the streets in April 2018. However, Wolfe subsequently has said he still intends to come out with the pigment book at some point.
Wolfe has given us plenty to consider. Accordingly, remember to take heed of nature’s vibrant colors and the properties of the pigments when making food choices. This approach already has shaped my eating habits. For example, I now eat not only purple and blue berries, but also purple and blue potatoes. I also have incorporated more black foods like black olives and black rice into my routine and pay greater attention to getting more green foods in my diet, especially avocados.
I find Wolfe’s advice on the colors in food to be quite simple and straightforward. Indeed, I dare say it’s black and white.
THE NATURAL PIGMENTS IN FOOD*
Yellow
Benefits: Immune boosting; cellular protecting; support cellular growth; tissue building and repair.
Pigment examples: kaempferol, lutein, quercetin, resveratrol, rutin, xanthohumal.
Food examples: lemon, yellow St. John’s Wort, yellow onion, yellow pepper, yellow squash.
Orange
Benefits: Anti-inflammatory; tissue building and repair; support movement (i.e., “happiness in action”).
Pigment examples: beta carotene, curcumin.
Foods examples: cantaloupe, carrot, mango, pumpkin, turmeric.
Red
Benefits: Chi energy (i.e., one’s moment-to-moment energy); blood building; heart strengthening.
Pigment examples: astaxanthan, lycopene, pelargonidin.
Food examples: beet, cherry, cranberry, goji berry, reishi mushroom, pomegranate, raspberry, schizandra, strawberry, tomato, watermelon.
Green
Benefits: Neutralizing, detoxifying, and deodorizing; cleanse liver.
Pigment example: chlorophyll.
Food examples: asparagus, avocado, blue-green algae, broccoli, brussels sprout, chlorella, green pepper, kale, parsley, pea, phytoplankton, spinach.
Purple
Benefits: Powerful protectors of central nervous system and enteric (gut) nervous system; nourish the brain and eyes.
Pigment examples: anthocyanins, delphinidin.
Food examples: açaí berry, bilberries, maqui berry, plum, purple carrot, purple grape, purple potato, red cabbage, red onion.
Black
Benefits: Jing energy (i.e., primordial life-force essence); promote longevity; support bone marrow and kidneys.
Pigment example: melanin.
Foods examples: blackberry, black bean, black cumin oil, black currants, black honey, black mulberries, black olive, black plums, black rice, black sesame seed, chaga mushroom, cistanche, eucommia bark, he shou wu, shilajit.
Blue
Benefits: Foster creativity; feed bone marrow; support stem-cell production and neurological defenses; support throat and thyroid.
Pigment examples: conchiolin, malvidin, peonidin, phycocyanin.
Food examples: blueberry, blue corn, blue-green algae, blue pea protein, blue potato, pearl powder, Saskatoon berries, spirulina.
White
Benefits: Support the lungs; boost the immune system, especially during seasonal transitions.
Pigment examples: anthoxanthins.
Food examples: astragalus, banana, cauliflower, coconut flesh, cordyceps, daikon radish, garlic, ginseng, horseradish, milk, potato, rollinia fruit, white ginger.
Brown
Benefits: Support the digestive tract; keep a person’s bowels moving regularly.
Pigment examples: proanthocyanidins.
Food examples: acorns, brown rice, cacao bean, cascara sagrada, cinnamon, coffee, dates, flax seed, lentil, seaweed, vanilla bean.
*I compiled this list using information on David Avocado Wolfe’s presentation charts at public events 2015-2018, with the addition of some pigment names and food examples based on my own research.
Author’s Note: I would like to thank David Avocado Wolfe and his team (e.g., publicist Angela and assistant Robina) for verifying the accuracy of this article.
