Food Circles: Envisioning How Eating a Variety of Foods Over Time will Benefit Health

Confronted with the quandary regarding specific nutritional recommendations, a hypothetical diversified diet is envisioned. A Venn diagram, in which each circle represents a separate food, is used to visualize how eating a variety of foods will optimize the nutritive value of a diet by complementing or synergizing nutrients from different foods and by diluting concentrations of individual dysnutrients. Eating a variety of foods may be viewed as a distinctive dietary pattern in itself, lending itself to investigation in comparison to other dietary patterns. A diversified diet over time should outperform the existing dietary types with respect to health benefits because available dietary models are not sufficiently diversified and include foods favored only for historical, geographic, and cultural reasons, and such foods may contain dysnutrients that could be injurious to health.