This is a chapter from my book, The Personal Health Tracking Blueprint. You can view the table of contents with links to the rest here.
A study conducted as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) found that nearly one-third (31 percent) of the U.S. population is at risk for at least one vitamin deficiency or anemia.
Many common health problems can be prevented by simply making sure you are getting enough nutrients in your diet. This is why you should have some way to track this.
There are many ways to measure how nutritious a food is, but most of them are too complex or impractical for us to use on a daily basis.
Take vitamins and minerals. There are many different kinds (Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, iron, etc.). Since these micronutrients are too small to be measured in grams (hence the name), they are more commonly measured in milligrams or percentage of recommended daily allowance (RDA).
If you read a nutrition label, you might see that a food contains 6 percent of the RDA of Vitamin C. Meanwhile, potassium is measured in milligrams. Unlike macronutrients, of which there are only three (protein, carbs, and fat), each with the same unit of measure (grams), there are dozens of micronutrients with different standard units of measure.
Not even an OCD person like me would be willing to track their vitamin and mineral intake every day and try to make sense of it.
Instead, I’ve chosen to track my fruit and vegetable servings because this is the simplest, most practical way to quantitatively measure the nutritional quality of my diet.
Why I use fruit and vegetable servings as my primary metric for nutritional quality
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