






4 Examples When Veggies are NOT Always Good For You
When it comes to veggies, more is NOT always better, and the TYPE matters for each person
by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author of best-sellers: The Fat Burning Kitchen
&
The Top 101 Foods that FIGHT Aging
There are a lot of things that health gurus disagree about... low-carb, high-carb, high fat, protein, meat eating, vegan diets, etc... but if there's one thing that almost every type of diet or every health professional agrees on, it's that vegetables are great for you.
Whether someone follows Paleo or Vegetarian or Atkins, almost everybody agrees that veggies are good for you.
However, it's NOT that simple, and there are definitely cases when you can eat TOO many vegetables and also certain TYPES of vegetables that are bad for certain types of conditions.
This won't be a fully comprehensive list, but let me show you a few examples...
Example #1 when veggies are NOT always great:
Some people that have a damaged digestive system, leaky gut, IBS, or other digestive issues may actually do more harm by eating TOO much insoluble fiber that's found in a lot of vegetables [Btw, grains can have TOO much insoluble fiber many times too, such as wheat bran].
My partners at PaleoHacks have an article here about 11 Goitrogenic foods that can impact your Thyroid health
(most of them are certain types of veggies) and exactly what to look for, so I won't go into any more detail on that in this article.
Example #4 when veggies are NOT always great:
As you can see, if I held onto the foolish belief that "more veggies is always better", I would be constantly irritating my digestive system with excess insoluble fiber, but I've learned through trial and error (and simply paying attention to my stool texture every morning and remembering what I ate the night before) that when I eat a "medium" sized portion of veggies with dinner instead of a large portion, that my bowel movements the next morning are always MUCH healthier.
Again, this is a personal observation for me, and some people may do better with higher amounts of veggies, especially if you're prone to constipation, which I'm not. In fact, I've probably only had constipation once in my entire life and I think that was caused by some antibiotic that I had to take when I was younger (I'd never take antibiotics at this point in my life unless it was something life threatening or a serious infection like Lyme Disease). But it's quite clear that my digestive system seems to prefer a slightly higher proportion of fats (avocado, nuts, butter, cream, coconut fat, etc) and meats or eggs, and a slightly smaller amount of veggies instead of those large salads.
Also, fermented veggies
are typically much easier on the digestive system, due to the fact that they're already partially pre-digested by the fermenting microbes. And not only that, but fermented veggies such as kimchi and various krauts are easily one of THE best sources of gut-healing probiotics. I like to have a traditional Korean Kimchi most mornings with my eggs... very tasty AND healthy for the gut! I also like to add a particular brand of fermented beets that I've found to my small nightly dinner, along with half an avocado.
As I've covered in today's article, you can see how more veggies is NOT always better, and there are some cases for certain people where reducing certain types of veggies may be beneficial. There are other examples I could think of when more veggies are NOT always better, but I just wanted to give you a few important examples in this article, because it's not always the best advice when you hear people say that "you can't eat too many vegetables". Well, as you can see, yes you CAN eat too many in some cases.
Please pass this important article on to any of your friends and family by sharing this page with them. It's an important health topic that most people don't fully understand.
-Mike
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