chasing rainbows
If you’ve spent any time walking around a fresh produce market, you’ll know there’s something primally stirring about being amidst such a cornucopia of edible colours. The crisp red of an heirloom tomato, the cartoonish orange of a carrot, broccoli’s lush forest green: these tones resonate with us on a fundamental level. Stare deeply into an eggplant and you can almost hear your brain whispering, Go on. Take a bite.
When it comes to fruit, colour’s primary function is to act as a signalling mechanism to the animals the fruit relies on to transport its seeds. Animals consume the fruit, travel some distance and then deposit the seeds elsewhere, in a ready-made mound of fertiliser. This is the reason why so many fruits are either red or black: these colours are particularly attractive to birds, the animals able to spread the seeds the furthest.
Thankfully, science has long confirmed what we’ve instinctually known: eating a wide variety of colours is one of the best ways to ensure a balanced nutritional load. Nutritionists generally split fruits and vegetables into five colour categories—red, green, purple/blue,orange/yellow and brown/white—each of which has its own particular nutritional strengths. For instance, orange and yellow fruits and veggies draw much of their colour from carotenoids, which help promote mucosal health and eye development, while red produce is full of lycopene, an antioxidant that keeps our hearts ticking along. White vegetables, like onion, leek and garlic, are rich in quercetin, a known antihistamine and anti-inflammatory agent. (Quercetin is, however, particularly susceptible to heat, so according to the experts, you should eat it raw.) While nature offers us more than 600 different pigmenting agents, only 14 of them are found in our everyday fruits and vegetables. “We’ve known for a while that we have these pigmented, nutritionally active components in our food,” explains Yasmine Probst, a researcher in dietetics with the University of Wollongong, “but what exactly they do for our health is still an emerging area of research.”
Basically, we know that many of these pigmenting agents are good for us, but it’s very hard to say precisely which compound in which ratio is actually proffering the benefit. While we might think we can just extract the beta-carotene out of carrots and improve our eyesight, in study after study it’s been shown that it doesn’t work; there’s something about the interplay between the beta-carotene and
