Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat - Dr Sarah Ballantyne

Big surprise with Dr. Sarah Ballantyne's new book is that she makes no mention of her four previous, best selling books on the Paleo Approach, Paleo principles and the Healing kitchen nor her PaleoMom.com website.

Since 2011, she specialized in using Paleo principles for specific auto immune protocols she developed, and those rules have been swept under the rug with this book. I agree with her new focus on nutrition with fewer "food rules". Dr Ballantyne has made a clean break from the diet wars, she even looks different!…and it is refreshing but surprising.

The Diet Wars are Over! https://nutrivore.com/book/

Eye opening, she does list the nutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies that can develop for each diet camp. For example, the Paleo diet can be deficient in calcium, chromium, biotin, vitamin B9, E, K, D, B12, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, iodine, and selenium. Low carb and keto diets have even longer lists of nutrient insufficiencies! She goes so far to say the vast majority of fad diets [her term, don’t shoot the messenger ] have restricted dietary structures, and regardless of what food you’re restricting on these eating plans, the unintended consequences is that you are also reducing your intake of essential nutrients.

One of the main conclusions of the Nutrivore Philosophy is "dietary nutrient short falls, are worsening, if not driving, nearly every health problem" So it is Understandable she has moved beyond paleo, low carb and keto diets to join the nutrient focused doctors.

She covers all the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients…what they are, and why you should eat them. For example, Vitamin D has 12 links to health. Find it in fish, shellfish, liver, eggs and mushrooms. Extensive detailed sections on Nutrients and your Health, which I enjoyed reading. She gives studies that support a wide range of Protein, and for active/older, up to 2.4 grams per kilo body weight.

The chapter, Busting myths on what, when and how to eat, is also good. She shows (or not) the evidence for 12 myths and concludes that you are Allowed to Enjoy Food! She also has a huge table of heath conditions and what nutrients decrease risk of those many conditions. For example, osteoarthritis has a list of 18 nutrients. Hair loss and brittle fingernails, 11 nutrients. Eating real food, not supplements, is the way to include such a wide spectrum of nutrients.

But I don’t need yet another nutrient density scoring system. The biggest negative for me is that it starts with a standard food plate, versus the PE, SPC or ON protocols that start where you are now, then adjust foods to be more nutrient dense, higher protein, lower fat, etc. Eating like a NutriVore can be as simple as a one page graphic, a moderate focus on nutrients in your diet, or a more complicated approach in this new book.

Nutrition is about Nutrients. Everything else is just Noise. Marty Kendall
Do not 'go on a diet.' Start eating now, the way you are going to eat forever. Dr. Ted Naiman

I looked around a bit on her site to see what else she had to say, and found this on the "nutrivore score" page:



They used this system at the grocery store where I worked, and while a food can end up with zero stars simply because there's "too much" fat, cholesterol, sodium or added sugar in the item, or get 3 stars simply because it falls into a low range for those categories, there's actually a bit more to it than that.

The guiding stars are based purely on RDA's on the item's nutrition label. They then add and subtract points based on the percentage of RDA: a high percentage of RDA in something that's "good" adds points, while a high RDA in something "bad" subtracts points. Similarly, a low RDA in something "bad" adds points, while a low RDA in something "good" subtracts points.

And of course we know what the good and bad are - "good" is fiber (it could be from sawdust and it would still be considered good), whole grains, low calories, or any of the 4 micronutrients listed on the nutrition label: Vitamin D, calcium, iron, and potassium (even if they're not part of the natural makeup of that sort of food, but instead simply added nutrients). "Bad" is higher overall calories, overall fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol (points can be subtracted for each of those), and added sugar - they want to see a low percentage of the RDA on those, or else they lose points.

What's considered to be "added sugars" is one of the problems because using concentrated fruit juices to sweeten a product is not considered to be an added sugar, even when it's the primary source of added sweetness. Sometimes a product's overall sugar/carb profile is higher than the same product in a sugar sweetened version, but the fruit juice concentrate loaded product can still result in 3 stars, whereas the sugar sweetened product loses points for the added sugar content.

The 4 micronutrients listed on the label are considered to be the ones most deficient in our diets - but they don't even consider the rest of the vitamins and minerals essential to health in allocating stars. If so many diets are deficient in so many vitamins and minerals, then Guiding Stars is hopelessly useless in determining what's a truly healthful food.

Last time I went on the Guiding Stars website and looked up a few foods, it took me a while to understand how they were coming up with the crazy star rating for each food. They all start as if they have zero stars. The get a point for each "good" RDA rating... but they deduct from those points for any "bad" RDA rating. In the end, foods which are extremely nutritious often end up with fewer stars than foods that are not only UPF, and very poor quality nutrition, but they still get that healthy aura that comes along with whole grains, low sodium, and unsaturated fats.

ETA: thought I'd better mention that I don't think this is how she determines what's good using nutrivore . Obviously she looks at all nutrients, not just the few that Guiding Stars uses (or some of the other good/bad food rating criteria out there)

If you are looking for a way to evaluate Nutrients rather than only macros and the big minerals, it’s better than guiding star or the Food Compass. However, practically using her score, I would be eating lots of liver and seafood. Marty Kendall commented on it and other approaches in this article: https://optimisingnutrition.com/nut...ther-approaches


She does a good job of a narrative explanation of why we need chromium for blood glucose metabolism or selenium for thyroid health or why plant toxins or vegetable oil won’t kill you and so much more, but the practical application falls short. There is no systematic way to assure a client is getting more of all the nutrients that she needs to correct the deficiencies. And she has not taken nutrient density the next step to include Satiety per Calorie and the "Bliss Point" for key nutrients that Optimising Nutrition does.

Nutrivore has an appendix listing hundreds of health conditions and "the Link between Nutrients, Diseases and Symptoms" A big table with the Nutrients that decrease risk. However, It does not give the Real Food that provides the necessary nutrients as in the Optimising Nutrition community resources…and supplements are NOT the answer.

Guiding Stars also bases their ratings on 100g of the food, which to me is crazy.

Who eats a 100 g serving of dried oregano? For reference, a typical grocery store bottle of oregano contains about 3/4 oz (21 g) of oregano - 100 g of oregano would be almost 5 of those bottles. The typical recipe only calls for a tsp or two of oregano, and that's almost always divided between at least 4 servings.

The typical 4-serving meat entree recipe calls for four 4 oz pieces of meat - but 100 g is only about 3-1/2 oz. So if you're depending on the accuracy of100 g servings, you either need to remove 1/2 oz from each piece of meat, or figure out how much more of each nutrient that extra 1/2 oz provides.

Nutrivore or any other nutrition scoring systems that use a 100 g standard to score every food really confuses the whole nutrition issue, making it way too complicated. Does it really help all that much to know that a food has a really high selenium or chromium content per 100 g if the typical serving is only 1 g?

And that's before you even get into the issue of satiety of one type of food compared to another, or the necessity of essential fatty acids needed in your diet in order to properly absorb the micronutrients in other foods.

I didn't even recognize her in her website photo. I'll stick with Optimising Nutrition and Cronometer to maximize my protein & nutrients and minimize the things that inflame my joints and sinuses (grains, legumes, unfermented dairy, processed foods).

The new photo and lack of acknowledge of her AIP Paleo books are certainly strange.

The food that first throws new members is watercress..it is at the top of some lists but weighs almost nothing so not adjusted per serving, would be a bushel besides few people know what it is or where to get it.
ON has made all this easier with infographics of the top 12 most Popular Nutrient Dense foods. Spinach and asparagus top that list…watercress, not even on the page.

Sarah Ballantyne’s first book, The Paleo Approach, was about using a paleo diet to reverse autoimmune disease. I haven’t read Nutrivore, but it sure sounds as if she has strayed from her first interest.