•  Book Review: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy •  Diet and the Color Code •  Food and Nutrition

The Color Code: A Revolutionary Eating Plan for Optimum Health
By James A. Joseph, PhD, Daniel A. Nadeau, MD, and Anne Underwood
Hyperion
308 pp $22.95

It's too bad this book used the word "revolutionary" in its title, because The Color Code's premise is not so radical after all. In sum, a diet rich in colorful fruits and vegetables bestows an abundance of vitamins, minerals, and plant chemicals that fight disease, aging, and even memory loss. It's just what your mother and father always told you: Eat your vegetables (and fruit) and you'll be strong and healthy.

The great strength of the book lies in the scientific evidence it provides to show why eating fruits and vegetables is so good for you. Your initial reaction to the title of this book may have been like mine: Spare me, not another faddish diet book.

So it's an enormous relief to report that The Color Code is not, in fact, another fad food book cooked up by a celebrity "expert" in concert with a publishing house's corporate marketing department. The three authors bring bona fide scientific credentials to the table. James Joseph is lab chief at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and a former researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Daniel Nadeau, also a professor at Tufts, serves as clinical director of the Diabetes Center and Nutrition Support at the Eastern Maine Medical Center. The third author, journalist Anne Underwood, is a veteran health and medical reporter for Newsweek magazine.

Color is the key, according to the authors. The chemical compounds that make cherries red, blueberries blue, and spinach green also serve to protect human health, the authors say. These "phytochemicals" ("phyto" is the Greek word for plant) contain antioxidants that fight cell-damaging free radicals, those oxidizing ogres that accelerate the aging process and promote disease. Plant chemicals fight cancer, for example, in different ways: Some suppress cancer activity; others encourage precancerous cells to morph into a noncancerous form; still others suppress tumor development, block hormones that promote cancer, or stimulate protective enzymes.

Plants and vegetables also protect against heart disease, stroke, and other conditions, according to a recent study of 9,000 people by researchers at Tulane University. They found that people who ate at least three servings a day were 27 percent less likely to have a stroke or develop cardiovascular disease; they were 47 percent less likely to die of a stroke if they had one.

Which fruits and vegetables provide the best defense? The authors rate them according to their ability to absorb and neutralize free radicals. These hazardous atoms in the body are simply missing an electron, and not all are bad. Some perform crucial functions such as fighting bacteria. But free radicals that are missing an electron of oxygen will attack a nearby molecule and steal one of its electrons to become whole. The damaged molecule will then become unstable as well, and attack another oxygen-carrying molecule in order to grab its missing electron, thus starting a chain of damage in the body known as oxidization.

Enter fruits and vegetables, which help the body create an antioxidant army to absorb and "mop up" the oxygen-scavenging free radicals before they do their damage. The authors judge the performance of each fruit and vegetable through a rating system known as ORAC (short for 'oxygen radical absorbance capacity'). Some popular writers who use the rating system have eliminated the acronym and simply refer to "anti-aging points," a term the authors say is not that far off, given all the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables.

Blueberries, for instance, rank near the top of the charts, with an ORAC score of 2,400. "They don't 'merely' help prevent declines in old age. They actually appear to reverse some aspects of brain aging, at least in animal studies," the authors write, citing a study on how blueberries affect rats' cognitive abilities and motor skills. In that experiment, author Joseph fed aging rats a blueberry-intensive diet and then tested their reflexes in a "Rat Olympics." The result? The blueberry-fed rats significantly improved their ability to perform such tasks as walking on a beam and keeping their balance on a spinning rod. Those findings were corroborated by a similar study conducted at the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

The book divides fruits and vegetables into four color schemes: red (strawberries, cranberries, tomatoes, and the like), orange-yellow (bananas, pumpkins, mangoes, and so on), green (spinach, avocados, asparagus), and blue-purple (plums, eggplant, grapes). The authors profile the most potent fruits and vegetables from each color group, listing their ORAC scores and disease-fighting attributes.

Strawberries, for instance, score an impressive ORAC rating of 1,540 -- the fourth highest among fruits -- and contain properties shown to neutralize cancer cells in animals. Oranges may rack up an ORAC score of half that -- 750 -- but they contain a compound called hesperetin that slows the spread of viruses and lowers cholesterol levels. Bananas weigh in with an ORAC score of 221 and provide an excellent source of hypertension-fighting potassium.

Much-maligned broccoli brings home a rating of 890 and provides powerful cancer-fighting antioxidants. And get this: Watercress might seem like one of those wimpy greens you find in tearoom sandwiches, but it's a potential cancer fighter, rating an astounding ORAC score of 2,200. And don't forget the sweet potato, which scores 301. This staple of Southern cooking contains more of the antioxidant beta carotene than carrots. It's also an excellent source of vitamin E.

There's no shortage of research studies in The Color Code, but the authors write about them in an engaging, conversational, and even cheery tone -- a little too cheery, at times, for my taste. (Joseph, for example, writes that he and his fellow researchers are tempted to snack on the frozen blueberries at his lab, "but the rats usually hog them. We have discussed this with the rats and they said that since they are the ones running the mazes and doing the motor tasks, they should get the first crack at the blueberries.") And the authors leaven what could be a mind-numbing recitation of such terms as "short-chain fructooligosaccharides" (a colon-cancer-fighting fiber found in bananas) with historical anecdotes, meal planning hints, and the latest scientific research.

Of course, studies about certain fruits cited by the authors are preliminary at best. Much more research needs to be conducted to substantiate the existence of cancer-fighting properties in beet juice or cabbage, for example, or the ability of cranberries to combat dental decay. "Many of the studies we cite in this book are cutting-edge science. By definition, that means there isn't an enormous body of research to back them up," the authors acknowledge. "Scientists are only just now beginning to unravel these mysteries -- and until they learn more, it will be hard to make definitive statements about many foods and phytochemicals."

But there's a wealth of long-term studies to validate the wisdom of a diet rich in colorful fruits and veggies, so the disease-fighting qualities of fruits and vegetables are hardly blueberry-pie-in-the-sky. "What's crystal clear is that populations who exercise regularly and eat low-fat, high-produce diets have multiple health benefits," American Cancer Society epidemiology chief Michael Thun, MD, tells the authors. "These include reduced risks of heart attack and stroke, diabetes, obesity and various cancers. It's that simple."

The Color Code diet is pretty simple as well. The authors advise eating fruits and vegetables from the four color groups each day -- the fresher, more organic, and more colorful the fruit or vegetable, the better. They also recommend at least nine servings of produce rather than the more familiar five-a-day dictum. To make this easier, the book suggests eating three servings of fruits and vegetables at every meal -- and with a cup of juice counting as one serving and a large salad as three, that's not as hard as it may seem. To keep readers on track, there is a scoring system to ensure they maintain the proper balance between the color groups. The guide even provides a sample seven-day diet.

But the authors are not food fascists. Recognizing that most people will not go cold turkey on their usual fare and immediately adopt a semi-vegetarian diet, they offer strategies for replacing unhealthy foods one meal at a time. That task is made easier by nearly 70 pages of recipes for tasty dishes ranging from Maine Wild Blueberry Soup to Crunchy Vegetable Burrito Banditos, many of which will help readers resist Big Mac attacks and wean themselves from traditional meat-and-potatoes menus.

Even the dedicated vegetarian will benefit from this book. All fruits and vegetables are not created equal, and there's a wealth of information here about their relative nutritional value. For instance, Yukon gold potatoes, a favored yuppie chow tuber, contain far fewer compounds that fight eye disease than their darker-hued cousins. Eat two small kiwi fruit, and you'll get twice the vitamin C found in a single orange, the supposed vitamin C champion. And raisins may seem a poor nutritional substitute for juicy grapes, but their ORAC score is nearly twice that of Concord grape juice (which, by the way, appears to help protect against heart disease). Besides packing an antioxidant punch, raisins contain a carbohydrate shown to help battle E. coli and other bacteria.

As someone whose favorite Saturday morning activity is to prowl the San Francisco farmers' market and load up on organic produce, I found myself revising my own eating habits as I read The Color Code.

The book inspired me to take a more deliberate approach to my diet. Rather than just grabbing an orange here or a red pepper there, I try to ensure that I'm including a range of fruits and vegetables with my meals. For instance, I now make a conscious effort to eat fresh spinach several times a week and reach for a kiwi, apple, or mandarin instead of a chocolate treat when hit by a snack attack. When making a salad, I see how many of the color groups I can include. Not only am I eating healthier, but I find that meals become more interesting when I try to jazz them up with a variety of fruits and vegetables.

The beauty of the Color Code approach is that you can do away with the typical CPA approach to your diet: accounting for every calorie, earning "points" for avoiding certain foods, losing them for indulging in others. As the authors write, "Instead of fretting over grams of protein and fat, start thinking whether the plate you've loaded up at the salad bar contains greens, reds, and oranges. That's not too difficult, is it? Ask yourself how you're getting blues and purples, too."

In other words, just veg out.

-- Todd Woody is a former senior editor at The Industry Standard, where he also covered the Internet health care business. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.

First published July 9, 2002
Last updated May 3, 2006
Copyright © 2002 Consumer Health Interactive

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