Leafy Greens 101 - Nutrition and Health Benefits

Hi everybody, this is Judy at Judy in the Kitchen. Today we're talking about leafy green vegetables and their nutritional aspects and health benefits. Now there is a lot to be said for this category of vegetables and I'm talking in general terms of leafy greens, not about any one particular variety of leafy green. If you want to see my whole article on it, the link to my blog is below and that will take you straight to the article. And you can read all the details there. I'll make this as brief as I possibly can. Now leafy greens are well known for being very nutrient dense foods and what that means is they pack a lot of nutrients with few calories. So you can feel free to add leafy greens to your all-you-can-eat-without-restriction food list. Overall leafy greens contain a lot of vitamin A in the form of beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E, and vitamin K. And many of the dark green leafy vegetables like kale and spinach also have a lot of folate in them which is one of the B complex vitamins. They also contain a lot of magnesium, potassium, iron, calcium, fiber, and a wide array of phytonutrients including the beta carotene that we made mention of, lutein, and zeaxanthin. They even have some omega-3 fatty acids in them. Now the long list of their health benefits, and again I'm going to try to keep it as short as I can, check out my blog below to see all the details. Cancer prevention. It has long been established that green leafy vegetables are high in compounds that have strong anti-cancer properties and those compounds include the isothiocyanates, carotenoids, and folate that we already made mention of. They're particularly high in the brassica family plants which we also know as cruciferous family and that includes arugula, broccoli, yes broccoli is considered a leafy green, kale, collards, brussel sprouts, cabbage, bok choy, turnip greens, watercress, and many others. Research has shown that eating only two or three servings of green leafy vegetables a week may reduce your risk for stomach, breast, and skin cancers. Now I would suggest you eat them every day, not just two or three times a week, but researchers have shown that a high intake of folate, which these are also high in, may lower the risk of colon polyps by 30 to 40 percent when compared to people with lower intakes, and some studies suggest that a low intake of folate, which means you're not eating a lot of leafy greens, can increase your risk for breast, cervix, and lung cancers. So eat your leafy greens if you want to ward off cancer for sure. Now regarding weight control and blood sugar control, leafy green vegetables are low in calories and carbohydrates, and so with that they have a low glycemic index, and that makes them an ideal food to add to your diet if you want to try to lose weight or even maintain your weight, and that low glycemic index combined with their high fiber content makes them a great food if you want to, if you can eat them often, it'll help to regulate your blood sugar and you'd manage diabetes. They're also important in helping to reduce your risk of having a baby born with a neural tube defect. Neural tube defects are where the embryo's central nervous system, which in early stages is called the neural tube, it becomes the spinal cord and the brain, where they fail to close properly, the sheath covering them fails to close properly before birth, and the baby can be born with a part of the spinal column actually protruding out the back of, out their back, and it takes surgery to correct it and they may have some movement problems as a result and some defects, other birth defects as a result. Now the unfortunate part is that these neural tube defects occur many times before the mother even knows that she's pregnant because it will happen very, very early in pregnancy, within the first month of pregnancy, so we often don't know we're pregnant at that point in time. So the moral of that story is you need to take precaution if there's a chance you could become pregnant or if you're planning on having a child, okay, so you need to take precaution, which means you need to get plenty of folate in your diet and leafy green vegetables is the primary way to do that, and you also want to take a couple other precautions as well. Research has found that women who are obese, have poorly controlled diabetes, or have been exposed to high temperatures like fever or using a hot tub or a sauna during early pregnancy, or they're taking some particular anti-seizure medications have a greater risk than other women for having a child born with a neural tube defect. So again, if you're planning on having children, you're trying to check with your doctor if you're taking specific medications, get plenty of greens in your diet before you get pregnant to get your body prepared for it, and stay away from saunas and hot tubs, and you'll do yourself and your baby a lot of good in the future. Bone health. Green leafy vegetables are known to be high in both calcium and vitamin K, and one role of vitamin K is to work with calcium in helping the body to build and maintain healthy bones. Without enough vitamin K, your body can't properly utilize all of the calcium that you may get through supplements or milk or whatever you're, wherever you're getting your calcium from. So you want to make sure that leafy greens are in there because they provide the two essential nutrients to help you utilize that calcium and build stronger bones. Some research studies have shown that higher vitamin K intakes are associated with lower rates of hip fractures and higher bone density, and we do know that leafy greens with their combination of vitamin K and calcium has been shown to help ward off osteoporosis. So if you want to protect your bones, eat your leafy greens. Heart health. Here's another interesting one. Vitamin K, again, is also known for protecting the heart from left ventricular hypertrophy. We'll call this LVH for short. The left ventricle is the heart's major pumping chamber. So in LVH, the left ventricle is actually enlarged, and that causes the heart to be less efficient in its pumping. And that's a condition that doctors often look for in older adults, but researchers have found that it can be found, LVH can be found, in other groups as well. In a research study that was published in the Journal of Nutrition in October of 2017, researchers monitored the diet and physical activity of 766 adolescents aged 14 to 18. These are young people. And they found that those with the lowest intake of vitamin K had the highest rates of LVH. Subjects with the highest intake of vitamin K had the lowest rate of LVH, okay. So now they should have had some follow-up with these young people well into their adult years to see if they actually developed heart disease. They failed to do that, which is a shame. But it does show that we can have effects that we're not even aware of if we don't eat properly. And getting your leafy greens, there's just not enough that can be said for them. So if you want to protect your heart and your heart health and your cardiovascular system, eat your leafy greens. Another important point there is the folate. Again, we've talked about this already, but folate is prevalent in our leafy greens. It's abundant in there, and it's known to helping to promote heart health. Having plenty of folate in the diet helps to lower our homocysteine levels, and that's an amino acid that we can have in the blood. And when we have elevated levels of homocysteine, that's an independent risk factor for heart disease. Getting enough folate in the diet helps to keep the homocysteine levels under control and down where they should be. Again, we can't say too much for leafy green vegetables. Eat your greens. Eye health is another reason to eat our greens. Leafy greens are high in lutein and zeaxanthin, and these are very powerful carotenoids, antioxidants that give a lot of fruits and vegetables their yellowish, maybe orangish colors. Yes, leafy greens are high in them, so why aren't they orange and why aren't they yellow? Well, they have a lot of chlorophyll, and the chlorophyll covers up that yellowness and orangeness from the lutein and zeaxanthin. So it's there even though you can't see it, so don't let the color fool you on that. The average diet is low in colorful fruits and vegetables, so the average diet does not contain a lot of the carotenoids. If you want to protect your eye health, you will eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables. And those two compounds are important for protecting the eyes from free radical damage. Our eyes are exposed to a lot of oxygen and, of course, light during our waking hours, and lutein and zeaxanthin work together to disable the free radicals that can form in our eyes before they do any damage. Some of the conditions that lutein and zeaxanthin may help include reducing our risk for age-related macular degeneration, really a big one, for developing cataracts, reducing our risk for diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachment, and uveitis. Now this is an inflammatory condition in the middle layer of the eye that can cause blindness, and lutein and zeaxanthin are believed to help reduce that inflammatory process that causes that condition. So again, we can't say enough about leafy green vegetables. Now one little word of caution on this, if you take blood thinning medications and your doctor or nutritionist has told you to monitor your intake of vitamin K-rich foods, then you already know that you can't just suddenly go on an all-you-can-eat plan of leafy green vegetables. You just can't do that because your medication may need to be changed. If you want to increase your intake of your leafy greens, visit with your health care practitioner first, and they may want to monitor your prothrombin time for a while as you slowly increase your intake of leafy greens, and they may need to adjust your medication. This is very important, so if you're on such medications, please do that so that you're not going to blame me for having some sort of a blood problem as a result of that. Okay, see your doctor first. Again, to see all the details, look at my blog post. The link is below in the description box, and that will give you a little more insight than what I've provided here. I do hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments below. This is Judy at Judy in the Kitchen. Bye now.