Eat your greens
Stuff has a story about ‘Powerhouse Fruits and Vegetables”. They get points for linking to the source, and for pointing out that although
“The rankings provide clarity on the nutrient quality of the different foods
the rankings are quite different from other rankings that are supposed to do the same thing.
They don’t point out that it’s silly to list scores to four digit accuracy when nutrient content varies enough to make the first digit somewhat unreliable.They also don’t point out that these are nutrient scores not per serving, but per 100 Calories of the food. Google thinks watercress has about 11 Calories/100g, so that’s 900g of watercress. The data are for raw watercress — the research paper doesn’t say how much the score goes down if you stir-fry it, Chinese-style.
If you much through a couple of pounds of watercress, it’s not surprising you’d pick up a few nutrients along the way. The applicability of this fact to NZ daily life must be a bit limited, though.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »