Lifespan-Essential Phytonutrients

There are thousands of phytochemicals that will never make it onto the side of a cereal box yet may play a role in reducing the risk of chronic diseases—and those are just the ones we know about. The terms phytochemical and phytonutrient are used synonymously, referring to natural compounds found in plants that can affect our health. (Phyto- comes from the Greek phyton, meaning plant.) They are not considered essential nutrients like vitamins, because we can technically survive without them. Instead, they have been called “lifespan essential,” meaning necessary for the longest possible life. In this way they are like dietary fiber, which is critical for optimal health and longevity, but not technically essential as coma patients can survive for years on an intravenous mixture of sugar water, electrolytes, amino acids, vitamins, and a few essential fats and trace minerals.

How many people are dying these days of vitamin deficiencies like scurvy or beriberi? Probably no more than a handful. In contrast, how many are dying from phytonutrient deficiencies? An estimated 7.8 million people a year. That’s the number of premature deaths that could be attributed annually to the inadequate consumption of fruits and vegetables, not getting at least eight servings a day. Millions of lives may hang in the balance, the balance being the scales that hang in the produce aisle.

In the United States alone, if you add up all the fatal cancers and strokes and heart attacks and other deaths that could have been averted with eight servings a day of fruits and vegetables, it comes out to about 450,000 deaths every year. There is a phytonutrient deficiency pandemic that could be wiped out with a couple more daily servings of plants. Yet the pandemic is getting worse, not better. Since the turn of the century dietary quality has continued to deteriorate. Both fruit and vegetable consumption (excluding white potatoes) has dropped by half. Legumes, also an important source of phytonutrients, dropped by about 40 percent. At the same time, saturated fat consumption is on the rise. Only about 1 in 250 Americans even meet 80 percent of the American Heart Association’s recommendations for a healthy diet.

Perhaps people just don’t understand the power of plants. Consider the first phytochemical isolated in 1804 from the poppy plant: morphine. In the 4th century, the first handbook of emergency medicine published in China recommended wormwood for malaria. Seventeen hundred years later this discovery was immortalized in a Nobel Prize in medicine for the phytochemical artemisinin, now included in the most effective combination therapies against the scourge of malaria to this day. In the Ayurvedic tradition, more than 1,000 plants were used in formulating therapeutics, including Indian snakeroot, from which the blood pressure lowering sedative reserpine is now derived. In the West as well, the British Pharmacopoeia, a compendium of medications published for more than a century and now used in more than 100 countries around the world, started out listing mostly herbal preparations.

For more on the long list of modern medications derived from plants see my video Power Plants. It’s been estimated that only 6 percent of plants have been studied for their pharmacological potential, but we don’t have to wait on the research results before deciding what’s for supper.