Why a Whole-Food Diet Is Not Enough: The Case for Natural Performance Nutrition
Written by
Sebastian Hallqvist
10 min read
Even in the world of nutrition – a world full of tribalism and online shouting matches – there's one thing nearly everyone seems to agree on:
The value of a natural whole-food diet.
If you're familiar with our company, you'll know we are 100% advocates for this as well.
But today, we'll explain why a whole food diet – even if well executed – is no longer enough to unlock peak health and performance.
There are countless obstacles that will block you from getting the nutrition you deserve… unless you know exactly what to look for and how to adapt.
Let's dive in...
Modern Foods Are Less Nutrient-Dense
If you want to feel and perform your best, you need to give your body the right fuel.
But here's the problem: foods today are becoming less nutrient-dense.
All factors considered, it's safe to assume the average supermarket whole food today contains 50-95% less nutrients than the same food enjoyed by your grandparents.
Why are modern foods less nutrient-dense?
In the last ~100 years, two major trends have contributed to the situation:
Changing farming practices
Decline in food freshness
Industrial Farming & Declining Soil Health
To meet the demands of a growing population, food producers have been incentivized to optimize for size, yield and pest resistance over nutrient density in foods.
This led to mass adoption of methods like selective breeding, chemical fertilizers and the use of growth factors and animal feed designed to promote weight gain.
As a result, foods have been steadily increasing in size and yield – but the total nutrients available have stayed the same or even decreased.
It's easy to forget that the nutrients in our food must come from somewhere.
In a natural system e.g. a traditional regenerative farm, those nutrients come from organic materials (dead animals, plants, manure) decaying, returning to, and building up the soil in a continual cycle.
But in the now conventional industrialized style of farming, that cycle is broken, causing rapid erosion of top-soil and leaving fewer and fewer nutrients for animals and plants to absorb.
In fact, the WWF reports that half of the topsoil on the planet has been lost in the last 150 years.
There are several downstream consequences of this, one being less nutrient density in foods.
According to research from the Bionutrient Institute, modern foods can vary drastically in nutrient value based on a variety of factors like geography, soil health, farming practices and more.
Some examples:
Apple – 3x variation
Zucchini – 5x variation
Lettuce – 7x variation
Beetroot – 9x variation
Grape – 15x variation
Meaning you may have to eat up to 3 apples, 5 zucchinis, or 15 (!) grapes to get all the nutrients you think you are getting from just one!
Food Freshness
Another often overlooked factor in the nutrient density equation is food freshness.
Animals in their natural habitat consume the bulk of their diet as fresh as foods get (just think of a predator killing and immediately eating its prey, or a ruminant grazing on live grasses).
This stands in huge contrast to us modern humans…
Most supermarket foods are now anywhere from weeks to months old. And after we buy them, we store them in our pantries, refrigerators and freezers before they are finally eaten.
Why is food freshness important?
Because most foods lose significant nutrients just days after harvest.
E.g. according to research from Penn State, spinach loses 53% of its folate after eight days, even while refrigerated.
These factors combined (less nutrient density and declining food freshness) lead to significantly less nutritious and lower quality foods (on average) than those our grandparents enjoyed.
And we are only talking about a hypothetical whole food diet here. We're not even touching on the fact that increasing amounts of ultra-processed foods are making their way into our food supply…
This could help explain why recent data from the Linus Pauling Institute shows that virtually 100% of people now have inadequate intakes of at least one nutrient.
Micronutrient inadequacies in US adults
The Challenge of Modern Living: Eating Out and Traveling
Even in situations with full control over how and where we source our food, it’s increasingly challenging to access all the nutrients we need due to the general decline in nutrient-dense foods and food quality.
But most of us also want to live dynamic, vibrant and full lives. We want to chase after our dreams, build a career, and have diverse experiences.
This means we cannot make diet and health the fulcrum of our lives – or else we’d be severely limited in other areas.
Which introduces a couple more challenges:
Eating at restaurants
Traveling
In general, restaurants are incentivized to use all means to make food as delicious as possible (so you tell your friends and come back to eat there again) while using the cheapest possible ingredients (so they can make a profit).
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with tasty food (perhaps the most backwards idea in our culture today is that healthy food is supposed to taste bad).
But restaurants will often compromise on the health aspect of food to get there (e.g. adding huge amounts of sugar and fats or excessively processing foods instead of using high-quality ingredients).
When you travel, things get even trickier.
You're not just forced to eat at restaurants more often. You also have less knowledge of where the healthiest restaurants and food stores are (there might not be any good alternatives at all...)
And unless you’re lugging around a gigantic bag, you don’t have the same access to all your healthy food staples, supplements, or anything else that may be part of your normal health routine at home.
Missing Nutritional Elements in The Modern Environment
In addition to what we’ve covered so far, there are numerous nutritional elements that used to be a key part of a natural human diet, which are now exceedingly rare or even completely missing from our daily environment:
Forgotten natural superfoods
Minerals and electrolytes
Microbial diversity
Forgotten Natural Superfoods
The following are examples of true natural superfoods that were historically a vital part of our diet, but we now generally don’t eat (or have limited access to):
Organ meats
Colostrum
Bones, Marrow and Cartilage
Bee Pollen and Propolis
Functional foods like Mushrooms, Roots, and Herbs
These foods are inherently some of the most nutrient dense, each providing unique health benefits that most of us are currently missing out on.
Electrolytes
Electrolytes are specific minerals that carry an electric charge and play crucial roles in various bodily functions.
Such minerals, like calcium, chloride, magnesium, potassium, and sodium are essential for hundreds of processes in the body, including cellular hydration, muscle contraction and relaxation, nerve function, transporting nutrients, and regulating blood pressure and pH levels.
As humans, we used to eat fresh mineral-rich foods and drink water from natural springs and streams with a high trace mineral content.
Today, most drinking water goes through treatment plants where minerals are filtered out. And our foods contain less of all nutrients, including electrolytes.
As a result, electrolytes are currently among the most underconsumed nutrients today.
Natural spring water stream.
Microbial Diversity
As humans, we are designed to live in constant harmonious interaction with the microbial world – through contact with soil and other objects in nature, eating fresh foods, and drinking from natural water sources.
Today, we are far removed from many of the microbial strains we would encounter in nature. Our world is becoming increasingly sterile as we’re taught to fear all kinds of “bugs”...
We:
Clean our home environments with excessive chemicals.
Wash our hands constantly and use sanitizers.
Even sterilize our foods (e.g. it’s common practice to wash apples in chlorinated and soapy water before offering them up for sale in the grocery store).
This can potentially explain the rapid increase in allergies and autoimmune issues all throughout the population – a concept often referred to as the ”hygiene hypothesis”.
Increasing Nutrient Demands
We have now identified several ways in which the modern environment fails to provide the rich nutritional context that our bodies need to thrive.
But it gets worse...
Environmental factors like artificial light, chemicals and impurities in our air and water, drug use, and consumption of ultra-processed foods can cause damage to our cells via the production of so called reactive oxygen species.
The more such exposure, the more nutrients are required to repair the damage.
On top of this, our lives are busier and more complex than ever. We expect high performance in multiple areas of life: work, sports, training, family, travel, social life, and more.
This “always on” lifestyle requires more nutrients than ever.
Our ancestors didn't just have access to richer and more nutrient-dense foods – when we study traditional cultures such as the Hadza people of Tanzania, we can also conclude that they used to rest a LOT more than we do.
In summary, we find ourselves in a pickle:
Our need for high-quality nutrition has never been higher, while access to the precious nutrients we need is at an all time low…
The question is: what to do about it?
Introducing: Natural Performance Nutrition
Our company started like so many others have: we were experiencing this problem in our own lives and wanted to create a simple and elegant solution for ourselves.
We imagined a SINGLE, natural supplement that would help compensate for every issue we've addressed in this article, and provide daily support for the life we want to live – a life filled with meaningful work, creativity, lots of physical activity and new experiences.
When we examined the products already available in the market, nothing even came close to what we imagined…
Most all-in-one products are limited to plant-based ingredients and filled with synthetic nutrients, dyes, emulsifiers and sweeteners.
We decided to make something completely new... using only 100% natural and real food ingredients (including animal-based ones) and absolutely NO sneaky additives or chemicals.
We're calling it OMNI¹ – it's every superfood and natural compound we wish we could consume every day, no matter where we are or what life throws at us – all packed into one convenient serving.
It helps add back nutrient density by giving consistent access to the most nutrient-dense and true superfoods in freeze-dried powder form:
grass-fed colostrum
grass-fed beef organs
organic superfruits & berries
organic kelp
bee pollen & propolis
soil-based probiotics
Plus ~20 more ingredients of similar quality that are otherwise missing or hard to find in the modern environment.
Now, does OMNI¹ replace eating all of those foods, as consistently, in their whole form?
Absolutely not!
Like we mentioned in the intro, it's not meant to replace your natural whole-food diet (and you should run from any product that makes this claim).
Rather, it's a key part of what we call Natural Performance Nutrition – a system for filling in nutritional gaps and ensuring the best nutrition possible in the modern environment, so you can unlock peak health and performance every single day.
To follow this system, all you need to do is mix OMNI¹ with any cold liquid and enjoy in the first half of the day (or whenever you end your fast).
Then, during the rest of the day, you eat a wide spectrum of tasty foods which are naturally programmed to promote focus, energy, resilience to infections and stress, and long term whole-body wellness.
Which foods exactly?
There is not enough room to cover that here.
But we invested countless hours compiling data and designing a comprehensive guide for how to eat the Natural Performance Diet.
It’s packed with crisp, simple visuals showing you exactly what to eat and drink to feel and perform your best every single day.
Enter your email and we'll send it to your inbox for free right now.
Closing Thoughts
In a perfect world, the environment would naturally provide all the inputs required to unleash our full human potential.
And we remain hopeful that over a long enough time horizon, our product and others like it will prove to be temporary solutions (better food options and positive change is becoming more available by the day).
It’s a bit like the dating app Hinge – ”the only app designed to be deleted”.
Similarly, we would love it if in 20-30 years, there will be much less of a need for a product like OMNI¹.
But in the meantime, we’ll be taking it every single day to fill nutritional gaps and unlock our natural peak state.
Learn about OMNI¹