Why You Should Rethink Your Veggie Intake

World-renowned functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman, M.D., explains why and how you should shift the plant-to-animal ratio on your plate.

A big juicy steak, a small baked potato and a serving of overcooked green beans. If this sounds like the dinners you’re used to, you’ve got the ratio of animals to vegetables all wrong.

“When it comes to your plate, 75 percent by volume should be veggies,” says Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine, chairman of the board of the Institute for Functional Medicine, founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, and 10-time New York Times best-selling author of books such as Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? (Little, Brown and Co., 2018) and Eat Fat, Get Thin (Little, Brown and Co., 2018). “Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate more than 800 varieties of plants. Because they foraged far and wide, they typically ate a range of wild plants of all different colors. In other words, they ate the rainbow and you should, too.”

A Garden of Benefits

Hyman explains that Americans don’t eat nearly enough nutrient-rich veggies, instead favoring conventionally raised meat. Though veggies cannot deliver pristine health all on their own, he shares three compelling reasons to make them the bulk of your diet:

• The vast, colorful spectrum of vegetables represents more than 25,000 beneficial chemicals. Research shows that the synergistic balance of these chemicals provides countless health benefits.
• Plants are your only source of fiber, which is fertilizer for the good bacteria that make up the internal garden in your gut. Fiber keeps digested food moving smoothly through your system, prevents cancer and heart disease, and helps you lose weight.
• Vegetables are your only source of phytonutrients (phyto meaning plants), a group of chemicals essential to vibrant health that protect us from cancer, inflammation, infection, heart disease, autoimmune disease and a long list of other chronic ailments.

6 Tips for Reconfiguring Your Plate

You can’t go wrong heeding the age-old advice, “Eat your vegetables.” But according to Hyman, this doesn’t go far enough. So how can you rearrange your dinner plate when you’re not used to eating this way? Hyman suggests the following: 

“Our ancestors didn’t have drugs or pills. They ate their medicine in the form of plants,” Hyman says. “All my patients eat a phytonutrient-rich diet. That’s the first step they take and the most important step, too. Eat the food that God made, and leave the food that man made. Eating real, whole food becomes simple when you follow this principle.”