Phytonutrients by Plant Family: What Changes When the Bed Changes

Written By Kevin Wallace.

Hey folks, Kevin here.

In February 2018 I posted a video called Nutrient Density Explained, and what you should know (1). The point was simple. Calories tell you how much energy is in a food. Micronutrients tell you what else came along: vitamins, minerals, and the plant compounds we call phytonutrients. I had Joel Fuhrman’s ANDI chart up, the one that divides a micronutrient score by calories, and I said we knew of more than 2,500 phytonutrients, sorted into five categories.

Eight years later, I would say it differently. The usual figure is in the tens of thousands, not thousands (2). My 2,500 may have been the popular 25,000 with a zero dropped. And I would not hand you a five-category list again. The chemistry does not divide that neatly, and I no longer stand behind the one I used.

The bigger change is in how I think about it. Phenol-Explorer, the main food polyphenol database, reported mean values for 502 polyphenols across 452 foods and drinks in 2010 (3). That is one class of compounds, and only the ones that had actually been measured. The live database is still in that range. Counting compounds was never the useful question. The useful question is which plant families are on your plate, because related plants make related chemistry. Change the bed, and you change the chemistry.

1. Where the skeptics are right

Phytonutrients are not essential the way vitamin C is. You will not get scurvy from skipping blueberries. There is no Dietary Reference Intake for quercetin or sulforaphane. A careful reader is right to distrust a poster that matches one color to one disease.

Isolated compounds also tend to disappoint compared with the food they came from. In 2000, Rui Hai Liu’s group at Cornell measured the antioxidant activity of fresh apples with the skin on. One hundred grams of apple had the antioxidant activity of about 1,500 mg of vitamin C, but contained only 5.7 mg of actual vitamin C (4). That is 0.38 percent of the activity, less than half of one percent. The rest of the activity came from the apple’s other compounds. Liu later argued that the benefit of fruit and vegetables comes from the whole mixture, not from one purified molecule (5).

Pills can also do harm. In the ATBC trial, male smokers given 20 mg of beta-carotene a day had an 18 percent higher incidence of lung cancer than men who did not take it (6). That is a supplement result, not a reason to stop eating carrots. It is a reason not to treat a pigment as a drug.

The other fair complaint is confounding. People who eat more plants also tend to smoke less, move more, and have more education. The large observational studies adjust for these differences, but they cannot erase them.

2. Same family, same chemistry

Plants make these compounds for their own reasons: screening out excess light, deterring insects, fighting off microbes. We benefit from what spills over. Closely related plants share the same chemical pathways, so the family a plant belongs to tells you a lot about what it contains.

The brassicas are the clearest example. Kale, collards, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts are all one species, Brassica oleracea, bred into different shapes. Radish and mustard greens are in the same family, but they are not that species. Switching from kale to collards often changes the amount of glucosinolates more than the kind. Cultivar can still shift which glucosinolate dominates, so they are not identical. Switching from kale to blueberries changes the kind entirely.

Two cautions keep this idea honest.

• Inside a family, the specific compound still matters. Sulforaphane comes from a glucosinolate called glucoraphanin, which is concentrated in broccoli and especially broccoli sprouts. Kale and cabbage lean toward other glucosinolates. If sulforaphane is what you are after, broccoli is not interchangeable with kale.

• Some pigments ignore family lines. Green leaves need carotenoids to photosynthesize, so lutein and beta-carotene show up in spinach and kale. Carrot, winter squash, and ripe tomato concentrate carotenoids in tissue that is not photosynthesizing. Those foods come from five families. Carotenoids are the exception that proves the rule. That is why they get their own row in the table.

The opposite is also true. Beets and chard make red and yellow pigments called betalains. That order of plants makes betalains instead of anthocyanins, the pigments in blueberries and red cabbage. The two pigment types are not known to occur in the same plant. If you want a single example of how family decides chemistry, that is it.

3. The families, one row each

These are the families that matter most on a plate in central New York. The last column is deliberately conservative. It says what the human research supports, not what the supplement aisle claims.

Family	What we grow or buy	Lead compounds	What the human evidence supports
Brassicaceae (cabbage family)	Broccoli, kale, collards, cabbage, radish, mustard greens	Glucosinolates, which become isothiocyanates such as sulforaphane when the plant is cut or chewed	By 2001 at least 120 glucosinolates had been described, across sixteen families, not just this one (7). The ones on a plate are concentrated here. Crucifers were among the food groups linked to lower risk in the pooled studies (8). Chemoprotection is a research interest, not a treatment.
Amaryllidaceae (onion family; genus Allium)	Onion, garlic, leek, chives	Sulfur compounds released when cells are crushed. Onions are also one of the top dietary sources of quercetin	The sharp smell tells you the chemistry happened. Outcome data are weaker than for brassicas and berries. Onion quercetin still counts toward the flavonoid diversity below.
Rosaceae (rose family)	Apple, pear, strawberry, plum, cherry	Flavonols (quercetin), procyanidins, phloridzin in apples, ellagitannins in strawberries	Apples and pears show up again and again in the pooled produce studies (8).
Berry families, grouped	Black currant (Grossulariaceae), blueberry (Ericaceae, the heath family), elderberry (Adoxaceae)	Anthocyanins and other polyphenols	Different families, grouped because they share deep-purple anthocyanins. Berries are one of the food groups linked to higher flavonoid diversity (10). Black currants also carry a lot of vitamin C.
Rutaceae (citrus)	Oranges, lemons, grapefruit	Flavanones such as hesperidin and naringenin	Citrus kept showing up in the pooled produce studies (8). Flavanones marked the most diverse flavonoid diets (10). We do not grow citrus outdoors in zone 5. A store purchase is fine.
Amaranthaceae (beet family)	Beets, chard, spinach	Betalains in beets and chard; nitrate; carotenoids in the greens	The textbook case of a family-specific pigment. Human outcome data on betalains themselves are thin.
Solanaceae (nightshade family)	Tomato, sweet and hot peppers, eggplant	Lycopene in tomato; flavonoids and vitamin C in peppers; capsaicin in hot peppers	Lycopene absorbs better from cooked tomato eaten with some fat.
Apiaceae (carrot family)	Carrot, parsnip, celery, parsley, dill	Beta-carotene in carrots; polyacetylenes such as falcarinol; flavones in parsley and celery	Carrot and parsnip are vegetable servings. Parsley and dill are seasoning amounts.
Asteraceae (daisy family)	Lettuce, endive, chicory, artichoke, sunflower seeds, sunchokes	Chlorogenic acid, lettuce flavonoids, inulin in chicory and sunchokes	If the week is lettuce and banana, this family is already on the plate. Coneflower, goldenrod, and aster are in it too. We leave those for the pollinators.
Fabaceae (bean family)	Beans, lentils, peas, soy	Fiber, saponins, seed-coat polyphenols, isoflavones in soy	The fiber and mineral case is solid. Isoflavones are a separate literature, with dose and life-stage caveats.
Lamiaceae (mint family)	Rosemary, oregano, thyme, basil, mint, sage	Rosmarinic acid, other phenolic acids, essential oils	Dense in polyphenols, eaten in small amounts. They add variety. They do not replace a vegetable serving.
Theaceae (tea)	Green and black tea	Flavan-3-ols such as catechins, theaflavins, thearubigins	Tea supplied 67 percent of flavonoid intake in the UK Biobank cohort, about two-thirds of the total, not two-thirds for every person (10). Good. One source.
Poaceae, plus flax	Oats, whole wheat, barley; flax (Linaceae, not a grain)	Fiber, phenolic acids in bran, lignans in flax	Whole grains are part of the cancer-prevention pattern (12). Flax scores poorly on ANDI because of its fat. That is a flaw in the score, not in flax.
Carotenoids (cross-family)	Spinach, kale, carrot, winter squash, tomato	Lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-carotene, lycopene	Leafy and yellow-orange vegetables tracked with lower risk (8). Lutein and zeaxanthin concentrate in the macula. In AREDS2, adding them to the eye formula did not clearly beat placebo in the main analysis. They did replace beta-carotene safely, given the smoker signal (9).

Allium is the genus, not the family. The family name is Amaryllidaceae. Older books say Alliaceae. Same plants.

4. Quantity and diversity are two different things

Quantity. Aune and colleagues pooled the prospective studies on fruit and vegetables in 2017 (8). Each additional 200 grams a day was linked to about 10 percent lower all-cause mortality (relative risk 0.90). Coronary heart disease was about 8 percent lower per 200 grams, stroke about 16 percent lower, cardiovascular disease about 8 percent lower, and total cancer about 3 percent lower. The benefit kept growing up to about 800 grams a day for heart disease, stroke, and death. Total cancer leveled off around 600 grams. Apples and pears, citrus, green leafy vegetables and salads, and crucifers were the groups that kept showing up for cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. Green-yellow vegetables and crucifers were the groups linked to total cancer. So both the amount and the type of produce mattered. Eight hundred grams is a direction on a curve, not a quota.

Diversity. In 2025, Parmenter and colleagues looked at 124,805 people in the UK Biobank (10). Compared with the least varied eaters, and after accounting for how much flavonoid they ate in total, those who ate the widest variety of flavonoid compounds had 14 percent lower all-cause mortality, 10 percent lower cardiovascular disease, 20 percent lower type 2 diabetes, and 8 percent lower cancer and 8 percent lower respiratory disease. Those are separate outcomes, not one combined bucket. Amount and variety each predicted lower risk on their own.

The detail I find most useful: tea supplied 67 percent of flavonoid intake in the cohort, about two-thirds of the total. That is the average, not each person’s plate. The least varied eaters got almost all of theirs from tea. The most varied added berries, apples, grapes, oranges, and, in that cohort, red wine. We do not drink the wine. Tea and a banana is still a different diet from tea, an apple, berries, and an orange, even when the totals look similar. This is observational data, and the authors say it needs to be replicated. It is the clearest recent human case for not eating the same three plants every week.

The gut. In the American Gut project, people who reported eating more than 30 types of plants a week had different gut microbes and gut metabolites than people who ate fewer than 10 (11). Thirty is a citizen-science association, not a prescription. It is still a useful number to check yourself against.

The World Cancer Research Fund points to the same overall pattern: whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and beans. It does not recommend supplements as a substitute (12).

5. Honest caveats

• The numbers in my 2018 video are out of date. Do not repeat the 2,500 or the five categories. I have retired both.

• ANDI is a sorting tool, not a health outcome. It rewards leafy greens and penalizes fat, which makes flax, nuts, and seeds look worse than they are.

• Beta-carotene capsules are a bad idea for smokers (6). The ATBC increase was 18 percent at 20 mg a day. Carotenoids eaten in food are a different exposure.

• AREDS2 does not show that a spinach salad treats macular degeneration (9). The primary analysis did not beat placebo.

• The glucosinolate count is across sixteen families, and the research is about chemistry and prevention hypotheses. It is not evidence that a serving of kale treats an existing cancer (7).

• Both the UK Biobank and the Aune studies are observational. People who eat a wide variety of foods differ from other people in many ways.

• The flavonoid diversity study measured compounds, not plant families. Counting families is my practical way to get compound diversity. It is a reasonable bridge, but it is not what they tested. Their most diverse eaters also drank more red wine. The bridge still works without it.

• How much you absorb depends on the meal. A little fat helps carotenoids. Cooking helps lycopene. For brassicas and garlic, chop or crush them and wait before heating, because heat destroys the enzymes that release the active compounds. The sulforaphane article has the details.

• Winter in Oswego County does not look like July. The varied week is stored roots, cabbage, onions, dried beans, and frozen berries. If diversity cannot survive the calendar, it is just a summer hobby.

6. Where we land

We eat a whole-food plant-based diet at the Sanctuary. You do not have to. But if you want the mixture of compounds that the studies actually measured, one plant family will not get you there.

Our nursery list already covers a lot of this table. We grow currants and elderberry for anthocyanins and apples for flavonols. The brassicas, alliums, beans, beets, and kitchen herbs go in the beds. If a family is missing from your plate in March, plan for that one. Do not buy another jar of the same green powder.

1. Count families, not colors, for one week. Aim for at least six. Brassica, allium, bean, a berry or apple, a beet or nightshade, and a leafy green or orange vegetable for carotenoids. Six families beats six servings of one.

2. Treat the Aune range as a direction, not a guilt line. Work toward several hundred grams of whole fruit and vegetables a day, with crucifers and leafy greens in the rotation, as your gut allows (8). The curve kept falling toward 800 grams for heart disease and death, and toward about 600 grams for total cancer.

3. Do not let one drink be your only flavonoid source. Tea is fine. Add an apple, some berries, an orange, or onions so you get variety and not just volume (10).

4. Chop or crush brassicas and garlic, then wait. Eat some brassicas raw or lightly cooked. Do not take a beta-carotene pill in place of a carrot, especially if you smoke (6).

5. Write down your zone 5 winter version. For example: cabbage or kale, onion and garlic, a pot of beans, stored apples or frozen currants, carrots or squash, beets from the cellar, and citrus from the store. Blueberry season here is short. The habit does not have to be.

If sulforaphane is the compound you came for, the sulforaphane article is the next one to read. This page is the map, not the dose.

7. Further reading

If you only open two of these, open the Aune review and the 2025 flavonoid diversity paper. The rest covers mechanism and catalogs.

• Aune et al., International Journal of Epidemiology, 2017

• Parmenter et al., Nature Food, 2025 (open access)

• Phenol-Explorer, the food polyphenol database

• Fahey, Zalcmann, and Talalay on glucosinolates, Phytochemistry, 2001

• Eberhardt, Lee, and Liu, antioxidant activity of fresh apples, Nature, 2000

• ATBC Study Group, beta-carotene in male smokers, New England Journal of Medicine, 1994

8. On our website

The carbohydrate piece makes the case for feeding your gut microbes. The currant guide covers one family we actually grow, sell, and eat.

• Are Carbohydrates Essential? Fiber and resistant starch, the other half of why plants matter.

• What Your Gut Microbes Actually Need The next chapter after the carbohydrate piece.

• Growing Currant Bushes Ribes at the nursery, and why black currants keep showing up in the anthocyanin row.

• Microgreens, Broccoli Sprouts, and Sulforaphane The dosing article, if sulforaphane is the compound you came for.

9. References

1. Wallace K. Nutrient Density Explained, and what you should know. YouTube. 8 Feb 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y2a90CoGU4

2. Greger M. Fighting inflammation with food synergy. NutritionFacts.org. 28 Jun 2012. https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/fighting-inflammation-with-food-synergy/

3. Perez-Jimenez J, Neveu V, Vos F, Scalbert A. Systematic analysis of the content of 502 polyphenols in 452 foods and beverages: an application of the Phenol-Explorer database. J Agric Food Chem. 2010;58(8):4959–4969. https://doi.org/10.1021/jf100128b

4. Eberhardt MV, Lee CY, Liu RH. Antioxidant activity of fresh apples. Nature. 2000;405:903–904. https://doi.org/10.1038/35016151

5. Liu RH. Health benefits of fruit and vegetables are from additive and synergistic combinations of phytochemicals. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003;78(3 Suppl):517S–520S. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12936943/

6. Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta Carotene Cancer Prevention Study Group. The effect of vitamin E and beta carotene on the incidence of lung cancer and other cancers in male smokers. N Engl J Med. 1994;330(15):1029–1035. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8127329/

7. Fahey JW, Zalcmann AT, Talalay P. The chemical diversity and distribution of glucosinolates and isothiocyanates among plants. Phytochemistry. 2001;56(1):5–51. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11198818/

8. Aune D, et al. Fruit and vegetable intake and the risk of cardiovascular disease, total cancer and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective studies. Int J Epidemiol. 2017;46(3):1029–1056. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28338764/

9. Age-Related Eye Disease Study 2 Research Group. Lutein + zeaxanthin and omega-3 fatty acids for age-related macular degeneration: the AREDS2 randomized clinical trial. JAMA. 2013;309(19):2005–2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23644932/

10. Parmenter BH, et al. High diversity of dietary flavonoid intake is associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality and major chronic diseases. Nat Food. 2025;6(7):668–680. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01176-1

11. McDonald D, et al. American Gut: an open platform for citizen science microbiome research. mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5954204/

12. World Cancer Research Fund / American Institute for Cancer Research. Eat a diet rich in wholegrains, vegetables, fruit and beans. https://www.wcrf.org/research-policy/evidence-for-our-recommendations/wholegrains-veg-fruit-beans/