The Rainbow Diet: A Colorful Approach to Functional Nutrition

On Wednesday, May 21st, FMCA hosted a vibrant webinar exploring how color-coded nutrition can support physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Renowned nutrition scientist, FMCA educator, and author Dr. Deanna Minich joined FMCA to share her groundbreaking work on The Rainbow Diet—a functional nutrition framework that taps into the healing power of food color and phytonutrients. With over two decades of experience in clinical practice, research, and education, Dr. Minich illuminated how color isn’t just visual—it’s a therapeutic entry point for whole-person healing.

In this energizing and insightful session, Dr. Minich explored:

• The science behind color-coded nutrition and its connection to different body systems
• How phytonutrients in fruits and vegetables support mood, detox, energy, cognition, and more
• The seven-color system of The Rainbow Diet and how to apply it in coaching practice
• Why food, color, and lifestyle medicine go hand-in-hand—and how health coaches can use this tool to spark client transformation

Attendees also learned how to use color as a conversation starter in client sessions, helping to inspire intuitive, personalized choices that align with functional wellness goals.

This replay is a must-watch for health coaches and wellness professionals looking to enrich their client work with a powerful, accessible, and evidence-informed approach to nutrition.

Love Dr. Deanna Minich? Check out her FMCA Educator page here.

Watch the Replay

The Rainbow Diet: A Colorful Approach to Functional Nutrition, With Dr. Deanna Minich:

More Functional Nutrition Resources

Looking to deepen your understanding of food as medicine? FMCA offers a variety of expert resources to help health coaches explore functional nutrition, personalized eating patterns, and how to guide clients toward vibrant, whole-person health through the power of food.

Podcast Episodes:

• Ditching Ultra-Processed Foods For Family Health, With Dr. Madiha Saeed
• Why The Recipe For Healthy Eating Requires Relationships, With Shawn Stevenson
• The Gut-Brain Connection, With Dr. Vincent Pedre
• From Diets to Supplements: Tackling Nutrient Deficiencies, With Chris Kresser
• The Power of Smell: How Food Aromas Shape Your Eating Habits, With Rachel Herz

Blog Articles:

• Food is Medicine: Why What You Eat Really Matters
• Healthy Poop 101: The Health Coach’s Guide to Digestion
• Food Plans 101: The Healing Power of Nutrition

Webinar Replays:

• The Elimination Diet Demystified: From Case Studies to Implementation, With Dr. Kalea Wattles
• Healing the Microbiome: A Deep Dive into L. reuteri, With Dr. William Davis

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: I have known Deanna for many years. She was actually my teacher when I was going through IFM’s program, and I was in the first class to be certified in functional medicine. And I remember just hearing this woman from the stage and being absolutely blown away by her brilliance and her kindness. And she is going to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart, which is “The Rainbow Diet.” And Dr. Minich is also on our faculty. She was on our faculty from the beginning when we launched 10 years ago now. And we are really proud and honored to have her as part of our core faculty. So, without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Minich.

Dr. Minich: All right. Hello, everybody. Yes. What an honor and a delight to be part of FMCA. It’s been wonderful connecting with coaches and with people all over the world just like all of us here today. So, my goal for this presentation this morning or this afternoon for you or this evening, wherever you’re calling in from, is not just to provide information, to also provide inspiration, because food is not just science, it’s also art. It is soul. It is connection. In functional medicine, we talk a lot about that, how food and eating is much more than what’s on the plate. It’s everything before the plate. It’s everything after the plate, after that food is within us, changing our gene expression.

So, as a nutrition scientist, one of the things that I have noticed over the years is that things come and things go, especially in the field of nutrition. And one of what I would call the steady eddies would be eating the rainbow. This is something that is not easy to refute because of all the science and all of the research that has been published on these plant compounds and how essential they are. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can eat the… There are different ways to eat the rainbow to make it a little bit more healthy and happy than in other ways. And we’re going to talk about that.

So, let’s dive in. As you all know, this is an educational presentation. It is intended to give you that information and inspiration. Talk with your healthcare team if there’s anything here that you would like to take further into your own health journey. There might be something… And I’m going to give you some tools actually. So, if you work with a health coach, you might be able to use some of these tools already and dive right in.

So, if you have looked at how people are eating these days, whether it’s in an airport, in a restaurant, I tend to see this typically when I’m looking at food logs of people and they’re writing down what they’re eating, is that there’s a lot of what I would call the white, brown, and yellow diet, which is kind of lackluster, devoid of color. Now, white, brown, and yellow are certainly colors, and I do honor them through the rainbow, and we’ll talk more about that. But we are having the absence of a lot of the other different colors. In fact, there is one color in which we have very short supply in the diet.

So, just for a second here in the chat, what I’d like you to do is to put out a guess as to which color of the rainbow that most people are getting too little of. What do you think that is? I’m going to put that into the presentation at a certain point, so we’re going to see what you come up with. Oh, wow, I’m seeing lots of different colors coming through the chat. So, continue to let that go, and I’m going to divulge what that color is as we make our way through. And that might be a little bit different for everybody, but for the most part, when we look at surveys or when I look at food logs, there’s one color that most people miss.

So, you probably have heard the statement, food is medicine. Food is a lot of different things, right? Food is memories. If I think of even my father’s connection to his Swedish heritage and the certain kind of bread that they have, or you might think about a dish that is carried on through the family line in some way, or celebratory foods, foods that we eat when we’re happy when we are coming together in festivities, right? So, food is medicine for the body. Food is medicine for the soul or for the spirit, right? It can make us feel a certain way. And I’d like to qualify that just a little bit more and say not all food is medicine. Colorful, whole plant foods are nature’s medicine, right? I’m going to put a little bit more of a qualifier there. So, looking at the bottom, those are the kinds of foods that I’m thinking about when we say food is medicine, but it doesn’t negate the fact of looking at protein, carbohydrate, looking at healthy fats, all of that is part of what we talk about in functional nutrition.

But this is not what I’m talking about when I’m talking about “The Rainbow Diet.” Some people like to make jokes after I say to eat the rainbow and they say, “Oh, yeah, what about candy and all these different beautifully colored foods that taste very sweet and are very enticing?” And what this says to me is actually that color is very powerful. Color is a very powerful healing vehicle just like food is, which is why food manufacturers can use color in order to capture the eyes, right? And so looking at something like this brings a sense of joy or potentially happiness for some people.

Now it’s very funny because some years ago on my birthday, my team actually created a cake that was made of all natural food dyes. Like the red was beets, the orange was turmeric. So, I just want to say that this cake could also be a natural food colored cake. And if any of you know Dr. Madiha Saeed, she’s in Chicago and she does a wonderful job with all of these beautifully colored cakes. So, I challenge you to bring color in natural forms in a way that is very eye-catching and inspiring.

So, why plants? And I just want to also say that when I’m talking about plants, that doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be a vegan. That doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be vegetarian. All this means when I’m talking about plants is that plants are the common denominator. It is the part of our eating that we can all share in. So, even if somebody’s following a meat-loving diet like the carnivore diet, which is very trendy, those animals eat plants, right? So, we look at elephants in the wild, we look at certain… Just animals, they eat plants. And so cows eat plants and all these different animals eat plants. So, we are connected through plants. Eighty percent of the biomass on this planet is plants.

So, if we take plants out of the diet, we’re missing a lot of different things. Here’s what we’re getting from plant foods. We’re getting minerals. And when I think of minerals, I mostly think of magnesium here. Magnesium is the center point of chlorophyll. So, when you’re taking in that green from a plant food, you’re actually getting magnesium. And think of how many people are short in magnesium. People have a magnesium insufficiency, a deficiency. So, it’s really important to bring in plants for electrolytes, for minerals. This is something not many people know. Minerals like magnesium and calcium and iron and selenium, they actually compete with toxic elements like arsenic, mercury, cadmium. So, the more that we have in terms of these minerals, the more that we are protected from toxic elements in the environment, which is becoming a really big issue these days.

We’re also getting vitamins from plant foods. I’m just even thinking of something I made on a social media post not too long ago about looking at beta-carotene and a lot of these carotenoids that help to convert to vitamin A. So, we can get vitamin C from citrus. I made a post on that not too long ago. So, we get vitamins too. And we also get fiber, lots of different fiber, which is so important for so many different parts of the body, right?

And what I don’t think gets acknowledged enough is that we get thousands of different phytochemicals. What are phytochemicals? They’re unique to plants and they are, goodness, we’re looking at up to 25,000 different types of phytochemicals. This is what the gut microbiome loves to metabolize and to give us a lot of these different metabolites that help us with things like insulin, help us with inflammation, help us with stress response, help us even with brain function. So, you’re only going to get phytochemicals from plants. You won’t get them from animals unless the animal ate the plant and in some way that phytochemical still lives on in the animal.

We do need to have some best practices with plant foods to watch out for pesticides and insecticides and herbicides. I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine Environmental Health Module. So, this is for practitioners. And we talk a lot about the importance of trying to avoid contaminants in the diet, right? So, this is where organically grown plant foods comes into play. And it also depends on how we cook and prepare them. One of the things that you may not know is that the smaller you cut your plant foods, and if you let it sit out just a little bit, the more nutrients that plant starts to make. So, if you take carrots and you have a raw carrot and you just cut it up, that’s good. You’re actually creating a little bit of healthy stress for that living plant, which then perceives that stress and starts to make some more phytochemicals. Now, if you shred the carrot, you’re actually potentiating those phytochemicals even further.

So, I want to hear from all of you. Do you eat plants? Do you bring plants into your daily diet? So, why don’t you just put on the chat a little bit about your connection with plant foods and what that looks like. I’d love to scan those comments as well. So, every time you eat plants, you’re eating a phytochemical universe, more than 25,000 bioactive food constituents. So, that’s why every plant you have and every part of the plant is a little bit different. So, the broccoli floret is a little bit different than the stem, is a little bit different than the leaves. So, it really does make sense to bring in the full spectrum of the plant as you’re eating.

I’m just looking at some of the comments that some of you are stating here. So, Harmeet, you’re saying grated carrot and beet spinach. Crystal, yes, eat entirely organic. Wow, very inspiring. And Casey, you’re saying, “I eat plants, love veggies, but I know I need more in my life. Really enjoy it raw.” Okay, great. Excellent. One step at a time, right, into bringing in new foods.

So, I really love the idea of food synergy. There’s definitely a place for isolating different things from plants and then putting them into a supplement. Many times we hear about turmeric and then we hear, “Oh,” then we take out the curcumin and we make a supplement for inflammation, right? Helping with healthy inflammation response. But there’s some beauty to be said for the complex of the plant and all of the different agents in the plant and how they all work together.

So, whenever I have a doubt about how much of something to take, I always go back to what does nature give us? Let’s go back to the complex of the plant because there are the perfect proportions within that plant for optimal… whether it’s uptake or even utilization. Now, when I talk about plants, many people think, oh, she’s just talking about fruits and vegetables, right? I’m actually talking about a spectrum of plants here.

So, how many of you have had edible flowers? That’s something I like to bring in when they come into season. There are some edible flowers. Check that out at different grocery stores, right? They make a beautiful garnish, but they also have different phytochemicals that you probably won’t find in other foods. Of course, fruits. And I know that some people have kind of a… I would say they think that fruits are not healthy, that fruits increase blood sugar. But whole fruit, depending on the amount that is consumed, the type of fruit that’s consumed can actually be incredibly healthy. And there is so much good literature on different kinds of fruits. I’m going to show you some of that research.

Get into your spice cabinet. Oh, my goodness, there are so many great opportunities to look at dried spices. This is like a little pharmacy in your kitchen. So, bringing in those spices before you cook foods can help to prevent some of the damage to the foods that occurs with cooking. So, lots of different options here. You might say, “Hey, Deanna, I’m following more of an autoimmune type of protocol and I don’t do whole grains.” That’s fine. You have so many different other things to choose from, right? And each of these foods listed here is actually a spectrum onto itself.

Now, some of you might be thinking, well, doesn’t she know about antinutrients? And what about oxalates in Swiss chard and in spinach? And what about lectins in tomatoes and eggplant? And are these truly an issue? So, I would say a handful of years ago, back in 2019 or so, we put together a review article looking at some of these “antinutrients.” And I put quotes around “antinutrients” because in some cases, these are actually optimum nutrients. When we look at tannins, tannins are found in tea, and these are actually polyphenols. And polyphenols, as many of you already know, are really good for the gut-brain access. The gut microbiome loves to have polyphenols. So, tannins are big and bulky. Sometimes they can bind up minerals, but they can also bind up things like toxic elements, different metals too.

So, in many cases, I think that we need to think about the whole of the food, right? Again, back to food synergy, not just having one small portion of the food but the food on the great big whole. And I also want to say that many of us are eating foods out of our normal element, meaning that we might be eating one food in isolation over and over again. Do you all remember the celery juice craze where people were having a lot of celery juice every day, like 12 to 16 ounces of celery juice, right? I’m not saying that that wouldn’t be a good thing to do for certain people, but it is a bit out of the norm of traditional preparation. A lot of these juices that have been introduced… We’re such a smoothie culture, which I think is okay, but we are doing things to food now that we haven’t done in the past ancestrally. So, our body is kind of receiving these things in new ways.

So, if we look at traditional preparation methods, like when we cook or boil, we ferment, we soak, we apply some of these different ways to prepare food. Sometimes that offsets a lot of these different things here. And as for oxalates, one of the things that we know is that having a signal as it relates to oxalates might actually tell us something about our gut microbiome. Maybe we’re missing some of the microorganisms that actually break down oxalic acid. So, some of these, what we call, antinutrients might even be signalers in the body that we need some, I would say, correction or healing in some part of the body. There might be a signal.

You know, also for a long time we heard about antioxidants, that plants are just a supply of antioxidants. But again, I think what you’re getting from everything I’m saying is that they’re much more. In fact, if you have concerns about toxins in the environment, we know that plants can protect against environmental toxicity. They can help to decrease inflammation and even help with the methylation process to remove things like arsenic and other toxicants. So, keep that in mind that plants are protective.

And I know that Dr. Scheinbaum will like this because many times when we think about plant foods and fruits and vegetables, we think, “Oh, let’s just reduce the risk of chronic disease like cancer and heart disease and even things like cataracts.” But we also know that the more plants that you eat, the better you feel. So, let me just stress this because this is an important factor. And in fact, if you are very interested in the science and want to know more, I put a lot of those references at the bottom. So, just even look at some of those titles: “Increases of well-being and happiness after consumption of fruits and vegetables,” right? “Let them eat fruit! The effect of fruit and vegetable consumption on psychological well-being.”

So, what I would say is that eat fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods, not just for the overall physiological benefit, the health benefits that it has, but also for the mental health benefits. You’re just going to feel more creative, more curious, and just have a better sense of psychological well-being is what the literature would say. In fact, look at this. This actually shows you what I just said in graph 4. So, with the number of fruit and vegetable servings, we see increases in life satisfaction. So, I just find that this is a really beautiful graph to remember that the more that we connect into plants, the more that we feel satisfied. So, I feel like that is a pretty profound finding, right?

The other thing I also want to mention to you, and this is by way of taking in different plant foods, that there is a little bit of intelligence to this. One of the things that I’d like you to remember is to eat foods in season. So, to eat foods in season, because what we’re starting to see here is that certain foods might actually be tapping into our circadian clock system. Like a lot of these polyphenols, I mentioned that already, this class of compounds called the polyphenols, they may actually be signaling us to work more optimally within the different seasons. So, go online, and you can even just Google, you can even search for what are the foods in season, and you’d have to look in your local area, obviously. I know we have somebody from Costa Rica on the call. You’re from all over the world, right? So, you need to see what is seasonal to where you live specifically. That’s really important.

So, having things like grapes in the autumn, cherries more in the spring, there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why nature provides us with those foods at certain times of year. What we’re finding scientifically, it may actually support metabolism. Because if it’s wintertime, and you’re eating a summer fruit, like an orange, it may tell your body that it is summer, and that you need to store fat and to get ready for winter. Now, that doesn’t mean you should never have an orange in the winter, but it simply means that eating in tandem with nature and what nature provides can make for a better, I would say, response to the environment. So, keep that in mind, that eating seasonally is something that has long been regarded in traditional medicine systems, but now there’s actually some science to suggest that there’s a reason for it. And that might be connected to our circadian system. And our circadian system is connected to hormones and metabolism.

All right, so I just summarized everything here. So many different roles of plants, which is why if you’re not eating plants, you might be missing out on something here. And I’m going to unpack these a little bit more as we go through each color of the rainbow. But basically, there are certain parts of the body that even store these different colors. They store these different pigments from plants. So, they work at the cellular level, they might work at the functional level, and they might even work just at the level of the gut microbiome, which can be very potent, right? Because then the gut microbiome we know is responsible for so many different functions. And if we just even think back to like the 1990s, when I was in school, we learned a lot about looking at chemo prevention in a lot of these plants, right? And with cancer risk increasing these days because of the environmental burden of toxins, we do want to be thinking about these plants in order to help us with DNA repair mechanisms.

All right, so I think many of us, we have a gap, we have a rut. As we go through each color, I want you to be thinking for yourself, when was the last time you had that color? When do you typically have it? And when you do eat that color, what foods are those typically? Now here’s the answer to the question that I asked you when we started. The phytonutrient gap, which color do most people fall short in? It’s actually blue purple. And that’s why Sandi and I are even wearing… She’s wearing purple, I’m wearing blue to be, I would say, a message that we need more of those colors of foods. So, did you get that right? Blue purple foods. Purple is precious. And we’re going to talk more about that and some examples of purple foods to be looking out for.

All right, in terms of servings, many times I don’t get fixated on servings and the quantity. I mean, I think we have to look at the rainbow over the course of a day. But in general, what you’re going to find is that many different leading opinion organizations, whether American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, a lot of these different organizations, what they say is five a day. They typically say two servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables. But just keep in mind that all plants count. So, things like spices… And I’m going to talk a little bit about that with the diversity tracker that I’m going to give to you because I do think we have to look beyond just fruits and vegetables.

Most people don’t know what they’re taking in because if you’re buying foods with a label, you’re not going to see all of these different phytochemicals on the label. I mean, you’ll see things like fiber and you’ll see things like B vitamins like folate, but you won’t see beta-carotene typically. You won’t see things like polyphenols. So, you’re going to have to look at color of the food to give you a signal.

Now I was looking at some of your comments on the chat and somebody had mentioned that they aim for a lot of diversity. So, in my new edition of “The Rainbow Diet” book, I talk about four principles. One is color. The other one is creativity, diversity, and rhythm. Diversity is a big deal when it comes to foods. Many of you are eating really well in terms of nutrient density. You’re getting the colors, but you may actually not be diverse in the colors that you’re getting within one color. In other words, what I have found when I talk with people is they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I eat red foods, I get tomatoes every day.” Well, that’s great, but that’s not diverse. That is meeting your color quotient but not aiming for diversity.

And what has happened is that ancestrally, if we look at the number of plants that we would forage, there would be thousands of different plant species. But now if you go into your average market, this is why a farmer’s market is, kind of, nice because you do get seasonal foods and you might get diverse foods. We want to amp up diversity. And I want you to think about that more philosophically too, because if you’re in a food rut where you’re eating the same things every day, you’re probably in a life rut where you’re doing the same things every day. So, when you start to shake up your food, you start to shake up your life. You start to get some of the benefits. Your neurons start to work differently. That’s neuronal plasticity. And there’s a lot of good science.

I gave a 90-minute talk just on dietary diversity to a group of health professionals some years ago. There’s so much literature and it feels like this is very much overlooked. So, even if you didn’t focus on color initially and you just focus on diversity, you’re still going to get a lot of different colors because you’re going to be cultivating diversity.

So, in terms of the benefits, what we see in the science is that when people have more diverse diets, you get benefits ranging from better blood pressure, better DNA… I would say, undoing the damage that has been done to DNA, so oxidative damage, even less risk of falls has been associated with a greater dietary diversity, better mental health, better immunity, better gut microbiome health. I mean, goodness, the list does go on. I mean, there are many different things.

So, just even adding one food or one spice has been shown to have a significant physiological impact. So, definitely be thinking about diversity. Your gut will love you for it. So, the more diverse your diet, the better your gut health tends to be, right? Because if you think of the gut microorganisms like this little population or actually a big population living in you, you want polyculture. You want lots of different voices and lots of different interactions. You don’t want a monoculture. This is like agriculture, right? You just don’t want one crop. You want different plants next to each other to create a more resilient, diverse, I would say, an offering of different phytochemicals. That’s what you want in your gut. And so, giving your gut a more diverse diet will enable it to do that.

You might have heard about The American Gut Project, right? You can go online and just start looking at that a little bit more. There’s been some research publications from the citizen science project where they collect a lot of people’s data. And basically, what they found was that you get more short-chain fatty acids, and short-chain fatty acids are good. They come from things like fiber. And that happens with eating more than 30 foods per week, 30 different plant types per week versus less than 10.

Now, personally, I like to aim for 50. I think getting 50 unique plant foods in a week is absolutely doable. And that’s when we count things like spices and herbs and legumes. And I even count extra virgin olive oil because you’re actually getting phytochemicals in olive oil, especially if you buy unfiltered olive oil, right? When it gets kind of green, you’re actually getting a lot of these oleocanthal and other polyphenols that are so medicinal. Very bitter but better for things like our health. So, there’s a way to do that in terms of the diversity. And again, I’m going to show you how to do that. This is just going through the science for some of you who are interested. I mean, even better cognitive function for people that have more dietary diversity.

So, if you’re thinking about yourself and you’re thinking, “Well, this is all really interesting. I might want to have some fun with this in my family,” you can track diversity through a variety tracker. And for any of the health coaches that are listening, you might want to do this with your clients too. It’s something that an individual can do and the whole family can do. You can make it like a game, right?

And so I have created my own variety tracker based on one I saw in the literature on the left. And this was from Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas, who has since become a great colleague. He’s over in the UK. He’s a neuroscientist. And he was talking about 50 foods and just to put the foods into the boxes, right? So, I took Dr. Toribio-Mateas’ tracker here and I just sectioned it a little bit more. You can make this however you want. You can just take a journal and just start writing in a notebook the foods that you’re having.

I just like to organize it a little bit more so I can easily see: did I already have that food or not? So, you see how I have this as vegetables, fruit, herbs and spices, nuts and seeds, whole grains, and liquids. Don’t forget liquids. If you have an herbal tea with five herbs, that counts as five entries on your variety tracker. So, everything counts here. Even a juice would count.

So, complexity is key. Things like stir-fries, scrambles, complex vegetables together, right? Fruit salads. I bought a curry powder from a grocery store, and I always look at the spices, right, because I want to increase, I want to amplify the variety. So, I have a curry powder that has 11 unique spices. You can actually make your own spice blends.

Now, keep in mind that if you have that curry powder on day one, you can’t count those same 11 on day two. So, you have to change it up every day over the course of seven days. And this is why… You know how you go to the store and how they sell big bags of apples? And it’s all one variety. So, if you were to have those apples over the course of the week, you’re only going to have one. You’re going to have one point to put here under fruit to count toward your variety.

But if you were to spend an additional minute at the grocery store and hand select five different varieties and eat those through the week, then you would have five different unique species that you could include on this tracker. So, if you want to play around with this tracker, you’re free to do that. I put the little QR code up at the top. You can just take a picture of that. You can download it, use it as you’d like if you have clients or just make your own, right, and put it on the refrigerator and start tracking variety.

Again, lots of great signs to support having variety. And when you have more dietary variety, what I have noticed is that people start to do different things. They start to live in unique ways. They might wake up. They might have a different routine. They might start reaching out to different people that they haven’t talked to in some time, right? You just start to get diverse in other ways too because eating is so much a part of our daily lives, right? We can’t help but have that principle move into other areas.

Now, if you’re thinking about children, let’s just say that you are wanting your family to have a more diverse, healthy, nutrient-dense diet. One of the things that kids love, and actually the human mind just likes variety, which is why sometimes it can get the better of us. If we go to a food buffet, we want to have a little bit of everything, right? There are some cases where variety could backfire, but we like variety. And what this study is actually showing in three to five-year-old children is that when you give kids three different kinds of vegetables, they will have more vegetables overall than if you just gave them one vegetable, right? The human mind likes choice. So, not just kids but also adults. So, just keep that in mind. In general, we are primed towards variety, and that might be the key to get people to eat more veggies.

So, this is just something that I tracked over time, just certain plates trying to get lots of color. And in fact, I challenge you because in one meal, I remember, I think it’s the one in the middle there, I tabulated 31 unique plant foods total. Of course, I loaded up everything with spices, so that counted for a lot. That was one of my hacks to get me closer to that 50 per week. I would also note, go a little bit slow because for some of you who have not had a lot of fiber, if you start to ramp up a lot of the plant foods, you might get a little bit of gas and bloating. So, you might have to, kind of, slowly move into more variety. So, work with somebody if you feel like you need a little bit more coaching.

All right. Well, in our next 15 minutes, I’m going to guide you through the rainbow. We’re going to get immersed in some of these colors. Very simply, the way I see the rainbow is in these five parts. Each of the different colors has a different functional signature. So, I make it easy for you to remember. Now, that doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t doing multiple things. But when you look at the data and you start to look at, well, what are these colors doing? What you tend to see are some of these patterns. Not exclusively so but you tend to see some of these patterns.

So, let’s go through red. Let’s start with red. I would like to see any comments here in the chat. How many of you love the color red? It’s like your favorite color. You love wearing red. You look for red everything. Maybe you drive a red car. You have rooms in your house that are painted red. Red is a power color. It’s the color of vigor, of action. Okay, Tina likes red. Echo likes red. You might have remembered back in the day, people would say, “Wear your red power suit to an interview because red denotes action.” Think of a stop sign. Think of a fire hydrant. Think of an ambulance. You need to clear the road, right? Red is… Sometimes it’s passionate. It’s activity. It can also be anger and inflammation when we look at the body, right?

So, when we look at the color code of red foods, typically we’re looking at very rich, high-antioxidant foods. Not always but typically yes. And many times they have anti-inflammatory properties and they help to modulate the immune system. Sometimes that comes through vitamin C. Sometimes it just comes through modulating inflammation, because inflammation and immunity are in relationship, right?

So, here are some examples, and I want you to be thinking about this for yourself. When was the last time you had a red fruit? Now one of my favorites for breakfast, and I find myself continuing to purchase at the store, I probably need to shake this one up a little bit myself, is pomegranate seeds. Pomegranate is wonderful because they are so rich in certain polyphenols that the gut microbiome just loves. So, that could give you a lot in return, right? Just a little bit of pomegranate seeds with a meal or sprinkled on a salad. I’ve got a number of other ones here too. And some people can’t eat because they get inflamed from those foods. So, case in point, like strawberries. It’s a high histamine food. So, that might actually create red in your body. Red bell peppers, nightshade, for some of you that doesn’t always work. Tomatoes might be inflammatory and give joint pain to some of you, right?

So, the color code of red, I would say, it’s double edged. Some of these red colored foods might actually impart inflammation. Like, if you have too much of a jalapeno pepper and you can’t tolerate that, right, that causes inflammation. Whereas in other cases, choosing red… I would choose a red potato over a white potato in order to give me a little bit more in terms of those phytochemicals.

Orange. Orange is the color of… Well, I love this color. I never used to like orange and now I find myself gravitating to orange pink. And when I think of orange, I think of the reproductive system, I think of hormones and I think of our fat tissue. So, who likes orange? Before I go on to the next slide, I’m curious who is very attracted to orange. Anybody like the color orange? Do you wear orange? Did you dye your hair orange? Did you have different clothing items that you like to wear that are orange? Anybody? Because I always like to see, you know, an almost… Salmon. Oh, Karen likes salmon. Crystal, orange and yellow. Oh, wow, peaches, salmon, cantaloupe. Yeah. Okay, Jodi likes to eat orange. Okay, lovely. And you’re bringing up salmon, which is a good one, because how did that salmon become orange? And it’s actually through these carotenoids that are an algae and a lot of the smaller fish, right, that concentrate that.

So, when you think of orange, I want you to think of carotenoids. Carotenoids are things like beta-carotene, but actually this is a family of 700 different compounds. I’m actually doing a lecture on carotenoids in June because so many people do not know about these compounds and there are so many of them. They’re what make plants pretty. They give plants not just orange color but also the red color and also yellow in some cases.

So, typically when we look at orange, I’m thinking about, especially for women’s health, there is an endocrine regulating activity. If you look at the ovaries, the ovaries concentrate carotenoids. So, when we think of even the process of ovulation, there is a role for these carotenoids and even some of the ones that convert to vitamin A. So, lots of different things here with orange. And in fact, I just posted on my Instagram that there was a study looking at women and looking at their consumption of different foods and finding that higher intake of fruits, especially citrus fruits, and they targeted one of the nutrients as one of the carotenoids, beta-cryptoxanthin, was connected to a lower risk for endometriosis, so kind of interesting.

Now beta-cryptoxanthin is not just found in oranges but also things like tangerines, persimmons, anything that is kind of orangey though, right? So, orange is the color of…just think of it in terms of reproductive health. So, here are some examples of other foods that you might want to be thinking about, a lot of those different fruits that are listed there. So, instead of an orange, try a mandarin. You’re going to get different types of phytochemicals in each of these. Tangerines, kumquats. I love kumquats. They’re so small, so sour, and just jam-packed with nutrients. When it’s the autumn-winter months, think about squashes, think about pumpkin, and just think about… In some cases with these vegetables, bring in a little bit of fat in order to help with the absorption of these different carotenoids, right? They like fat, so sometimes you just need a little bit of fat. Don’t worry about the fruits. Those will do fine. And the carotenoids are very bioavailable, but with the veggies, sometimes you just need a little… Because it’s bound up in more fiber. So, many times you need a little bit of cooking and a little bit of fat to help with the uptake.

All right. Yellow. How many of you like yellow? Yellow is one of those colors. There was a study done on yellow, and people with a healthy mood state actually chose yellow as their favorite color. In one of the homes that I lived in, I painted every room of the house a different color to match what I wanted the feeling to be. So, I remember I painted the kitchen yellow because I think of the fire element. I think of the gut. Sunshine yellow, absolutely. Butter yellow. That’s a great one. Butter yellow. Yes. A lemon. Perfect. Lots of different food associations here that we have. Many of us like yellow. It’s the color of happiness, optimism, and joy, right? When we see the sun, that typically brings better mood.

So, when we think of body systems, equate yellow with the gut. So, yellow as the seed of fire, the seed of a lot of transformation. We have acids in the gut. We have bile, which is kind of yellow green. So, a lot of these different yellow foods can help to support the gut, either through the stomach or through the microbiome or through even the process of metabolic detoxification. So, some of the options here in terms of fruits and vegetables.

Now remember when I first started the talk, I was saying that many people are getting too much in the way of yellow, right? So, here is where we want to be very discerning about the kind of yellow. I’m not talking about the breads, and the cakes, and the cookies, and the crackers, and waffles, and pancakes and ready to eat cereal yellow. I’m talking about the wholesome color of different fruits, even vegetables. And I do put corn into this category, like whole kernel cob corn. Ginger is a great one for the gut, different squashes. So, we really have to look a little bit deeper to find… You know, bananas. I could have put plantains on here as well. They tend to be a little bit green. Also, in “The Rainbow Diet” book, I have yellow, tan, and brown. So, I go a little bit deeper there. And the tan and the brown typically bring in more of the prebiotic fibers to help with things like the gut microbiome.

So, yes, and I posted a study on apple cider vinegar, which we think of as yellow. And we know that that helps things like blood sugar. Let’s think of things like pineapple. Pineapple contains different enzymes to help us break down protein, right? So, these are all very digestive rich types of foods. So, the healthy yellow would help us with our digestive tract is kind of how I simply think about it.

All right. Who loves green? I actually have to say that this is my favorite color. I try not to have a favorite color, but since I was seven, I love to wear green. I have to prevent myself from wearing green because I love it. Danielle loves it too. Okay. Mercedes likes it. Gita likes green foods. You know, this is a color to me of healing nature. It’s the heart. And why do I say it’s the heart? Because if you look at a lot of the green foods, green foods contain different nutrients that help the cardiovascular system, help circulation, dietary nitrates, bright green. You know, that’s a good point, Crystal. There are so many different kinds of green. You have lime green, you have grass green, you have sage green. I love them all. I love green. Something about green, right? This planet is so green, green and blue.

So, when I think of cardiovascular health here, what do you get in green foods? Vitamin K, there are different forms of vitamin K, but the vitamin K that’s in green foods, I like to consider that vitamin K is like the next vitamin D. I think we’re going to hear more about vitamin K than we have heard. There’s complexity within vitamin K, but you get vitamin K. The K stands for coagulation in German. And so it’s important for blood clotting. It’s important for healthy blood circulation. So, that definitely ties into vessel health, right? Folate, magnesium, potassium, nitrates. You get a lot of different flavonoids that have cardio protective benefit.

So, if you were to eat a big green leafy salad, because of what it contains, you would tend to feel more relaxed because your blood vessels will tend to get relaxed with these different actives within green foods. So, this is a short list. By the way, I have a rainbow diet list, a shopping list that goes into much more depth. This is just to kind of give you a quick look at what are some of the fruits and veggies that are green and that would count towards your diversity and your color, right? So, all things green. And back to that extra virgin olive oil, the greener, the better. In fact, when I was in Cyprus a few years ago, I noticed that the extra virgin olive oil on the shelves was lime green, literally lime green because of all of those different olive polyphenols. So, follow the green, follow the color because… And when we overcook green foods, like if you take broccoli and you overcook it, it loses its green, right? It loses its phytochemicals. So, cooking can definitely change that.

All right, then we’ll end on blue purple. This again is the color that people are getting too little of. And when I think of blue purple foods, I think of the brain. I think of cognition, learning, memory, and even mood. In fact, I was just in Chicago, my hometown. I know that Sandi and others live in Chicago. I was just there at the end of April giving a talk at a cognition conference talking about the power of purple. All right, I need to ask how many of you like purple since we are… This is usually… I get all… If I was in an audience with you, I’d have a lot of hands going up, “I love purple.” Even my niece when she was little was trying to say purple. She loved it so much. She would always wear purple. A lot of purple and blue lovers. Okay, your childhood bedroom was purple. Okay, somebody says they have weirdly never liked purple. Mauve. Blueberries. It’s royal. Yes, very good, Antoinette. That’s what I’d say too. I think of it as precious.

So, what’s the color code of blue purple foods? They’re rich in polyphenols, much like the red foods. Sometimes I think of the continuum of red, blue, purple, black foods. So, I’m mentioning black here too, like blackberries. Black olives would also be rich in some of these different components. And there is so much literature. We could come back and we can just do a talk on blue purple foods for a whole hour because there’s so much science to suggest the impact of these foods on the brain, even in young children. So, even if the brain is not unhealthy, and even if you have healthy cognition, you can improve your brain further through these blue purple foods. I know that seems like, “How could that be?” But they optimize your brain.

And in fact, this is one of those examples where in some of the research from Dr. James Joseph and his group at Tufts University, what they found was that at least in animals, that certain of these blue purple compounds would make their way into the brain and structurally be part of the brain matter to have an impact on the function related to cognition. So, we might have like these compounds in our brain doing their work of optimizing the neurons. And in fact, blueberries are like Miracle-Gro for the brain. They increase what’s called brain derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. All that means is that you get more nerve cells, you get healthy nerve growth through a lot of these blueberry compounds. And I’m certain there’s probably some of these others too, it’s just that blueberries have been the most well studied.

So, if you look at this list, it’s kind of a short list. You don’t have a lot of choices, which is why sometimes it could be challenging to get blue purple foods. So, whenever you see a blue purple variety of food in the store, if you see purple kale next to green kale, choose purple. Choose purple whenever possible. That is my mantra.

All right, so this is kind of a summary. I love making these little infographics, right? So, again, just to give you a quick gaze into the different body systems and the color code based on kind of like looking at pattern recognition of the different science studies that are out there, so, red, immune, inflammatory response, orange, reproductive health, yellow, tan, brown, think of digestive health, green, we’re thinking of the green leaves, we’re thinking of nitrates, folates, heart health, vessel health. I didn’t get into blue green, but there is a case to be made for blue green seed plants, giving us a lot of things that we need for the thyroid like iodine and different actives within these seed plants. Purple, black, blue, brain health.

And I didn’t get into white either. I do talk about that in “The Rainbow Diet” book, but white kind of… Sometimes I even talk about the absence of color and having intermittent fasting, right? And rejuvenating the body in that way. So, there is this for all of you to just take and use it as you’d like with your practitioners. This is a three part Rainbow Diet toolkit. So, coaches, you can use this too, if you want. This summarizes eat the rainbow plant foods, why, what, how and where. This is the actual tracker. It was so cute.

I received a photograph of somebody who used this with her five-year-old. And she showed me the photograph. It was him filling in the circles, which really told me that, you know, a 5-year-old can do this, a 50-year-old can do this, an 80-year-old can do this. The whole family can do this. It’s so easy just to aim for one color per day. You don’t have to count calories. You count colors, which makes it much more engaging and sustainable.

This is that shopping list I was speaking to. So, that three-part kit does give you the shopping list and kind of goes through that. So, again, if you want to take a picture of that QR code in the top right, you can download this. And I always get questions as to like, can I use it? Yes, you can use this. This is also a tool that I put together on food and mood. You know, I have this phrase that “colorful foods make for colorful moods.” And so what you also might want to do is look at the colors of your foods to see if there’s a trend here with how you feel. And so each of the colors corresponds to a mood state, and you’ll see that in the directions.

All right, I think I’m almost out of time here. So, this is a summary of “The Rainbow Diet,” right? It’s more than just the colors. It’s diversity, it’s rhythm, it’s being creative, it’s being conscious and mindful, and looking at the whole of eating. Find a community that you can have this experience with, right? So, the people that you connect with while eating, which is why you’re all here, is you have like minds, right? So, you’re going to support each other with that colorful food intake. So, I’ll leave you with this message of “eat the rainbow for your inner rainbow.” I do have some books out there, and everything about me you can find on my website, deannaminich.com.

Dr. Sandi: Wow, that was incredible. And what I love particularly is that this is something that is coach-friendly. As a coach, you can teach this to your clients and you can also teach it to your community. And it is such a wonderful and easy way to create better health. So, we have a number of questions. I know we won’t get through all of them. I want to say again, you will have a recording, but Lauren wants to know, how does the plant release more phytochemicals to stress if it’s already picked and dead?

Dr. Minich: It’s not dead. Actually, if you have raw food, many times you still have the living matter. Once you cook it, now you start to change it, right? And some people have asked me, “Well, can I just have a cooked carrot and then cut it up?” I don’t think you’ll have the same effect as when the carrot is… And you’re right, Lauren. I mean, if it’s in the ground, it has the sun, it still has the soil, but food is still living after it’s been picked, right? And that’s why you want to reduce the decay because you know, it starts to go bad after some time it starts to die. But when it’s raw, it is still living and so you can still potentiate those phytochemicals. And I have a reference for that study if you are interested. I just posted it on my LinkedIn today, as a matter of fact.

Dr. Sandi: Okay, we will check it out. So, do spices that have been sitting around past expiration date lose their nutrient value or just their flavor?

Dr. Minich: I think the two things are connected. So, I would, yeah, clean out those spices if they’ve gone past their expiration. That’s what I have found because I have done home visits before. That’s one of the last things that people look at is the expiration on their spices. But if they’re caked, and when you turn them upside down, nothing happens, you should toss them. You can probably put them in your compost in your garden. They would make for an enrichment of the soil. But in terms of getting you concentrated nutrients, it probably wouldn’t give you that same potency anymore.

Dr. Sandi: Guidance on specific food combining to help reduce possible antinutrient intolerance.

Dr. Minich: Well, back to that tannins that I was talking about. So, if you have a cup of tea an hour after a meal, then you prevent binding to things like iron if it’s an iron-rich meal. So, that’s one thing you can do. There’s also kind of the sequence of… We didn’t talk about this, but the sequence of how to eat certain foods, right, having lots of fiber first in order to buffer from some of the blood sugar effects of some of the other things in the meal. Fat in the meal will slow the stomach from emptying a lot of those foods. So, I think what this person might be asking about is fruit with protein and things like that. There isn’t a lot of data on that. But as far as antinutrients, I would say proper cooking, fermenting should do the trick, and it helps to reduce a lot of those “antinutrients.”

Dr. Sandi: How about eating seasonally? Must it be geographically adapted depending on where we live?

Dr. Minich: Ideally, yes. Ideally, yes. But if you travel a lot, you might want to flex that a little bit.

Dr. Sandi: Mm-hmm, sure. So, when you mentioned cutting food smaller to increase polyphenol content, does the mouth do this as well while chewing, or we do we need the rest time before consumption?

Dr. Minich: I think that reaction needs a little bit of time to take place. So, of course chewing will help to create that stress in the mouth, but then you actually need some time for the different components of the cells to come together to have the reaction, right? So, chewing is good. I won’t say that it’s not, but cutting in small pieces and then letting it sit for a little bit is probably better or to do that in conjunction with proper chewing.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. We’ll just have time for just a couple more. Are we attracted to different colored fruits and vegetables based on our metabolic needs and inherent intelligence of our bodies?

Dr. Minich: Wow, that is a very beautiful thought-provoking question. I don’t think we know the answer to that definitively, but based on what we know about seasonal eating, circadian rhythm, time to metabolic issues, I would venture to say that there is something there. Absolutely. You know, look at the foods that we’re drawn to. Are we drawn to those foods for dysfunctional reasons or functional reasons where we need something?

Dr. Sandi: Makes sense. Okay. Is there a daily upper limit for fruits?

Dr. Minich: That’s a good question. I think you have to look at the whole of the diet. It’s not just the fruits, but I would need to know the context of what else are you eating? Is it just the fruits or is it primarily the fruits? We don’t want that either. There was a study on mangoes showing that women had better skin health when they had, I think it was, a half a cup of mango a day. But when they went beyond half a cup, when they started eating too much, then it led to more skin aging. So, there’s a Goldilocks principle to everything. Not too little, not too much, just right.

Dr. Sandi: Sure. And that’s where something like a CGM might come in handy too to let you know, are you overeating? So, this final question… And, Julianne, there is no such thing as a dumb question, wants to know, does reproductive health matter if you don’t plan on reproducing?

Dr. Minich: Well, but it can also impact other things like hormone levels, right? So, ovaries are connected to progesterone levels, that connects to sleep. So, I would say, think about it not… Reproductive health is probably a limiting way for me to say it. It might be better to say things like hormones or endocrine health. That’s actually what I’m intending even more, even though there is research on fertility and carotenoids. So, thank you for that distinction. I think we can expand that category open to non-reproductive functions but connected to the reproductive system.

Dr. Sandi: Sure. And finally, Anna wants to know if you have a favorite easy recipe cookbook that you’d recommend for rainbow eating?

Dr. Minich: That is a good question. You know whose work I would say to check out is… Alissa Segersten has a book, “Nourishing Meals.” She wrote “The Elimination Diet” book together with Tom Malterre. And she has a number of great… She’s always posting on things. In fact, I can put her name… I think I’m spelling it right. Check her out. Check out her books and her material. She gives a lot away, just like her recipes. I really like what she does. In fact, I asked her. I said, “I want you to write a polyphenol cookbook.” So, if I want more polyphenols for the brain-gut axis, give me some of those recipes. So, she might actually write that. So, be on the lookout.

Dr. Sandi: All right. Well, this has been outstanding. I want to thank you again for all of the wisdom that you impart. And I know that I learned a lot. I always do when I listen to you. I’m going to think about what I’m going to eat. In fact, I was at the farmer’s market and I found purple asparagus.

Dr. Minich: Yes, I love that.

Dr. Sandi: Great. The best. So wonderful. I hope everybody here will be eating the rainbow and teaching people how to eat the rainbow as well. Thank you. We did our best to answer questions. If we didn’t get to yours, we will do our best or come to another webinar. We will definitely have Dr. Deanna back. So, thank you again, and thanks for coming, everybody.

Dr. Minich: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Sandi.

Dr. Sandi: Bye now.

Dr. Minich: Bye.