Mascha Davis grew up eating nutrient-dense “and really delicious” Russian and Ukrainian dishes that her mom cooked—“a lot of traditional foods like borscht and a lot of the different Russian salads with lots of veggies.” Now, the registered dietitian, nutritionist, and author wants you to fill your plate with vitamins and minerals too.
Davis emphasizes the importance of consuming nutrients together in whole foods in her new book, Eat Your Vitamins: Your Guide to Using Natural Foods to Get the Vitamins, Minerals, and Nutrients Your Body Needs. “Research is showing more and more that there are so many compounds in foods that work together in synergy,” she says. “They are very hard to isolate and don’t work in isolation the same way that they work when they’re all together. There are compounds that affect how vitamins and minerals are absorbed that are in that fruit or vegetable, so the absorption isn’t going to be the same if we just have that vitamin or mineral isolated in a pill. It’s going to act differently in the body.”