What are the vegetables necessary for good health? The answer is that there are none. As in nada, no sireebob, no way Jose, neither jot nor tittle. There is simply not a single vegetable, nor any combination thereof, that a human critter absolutely must eat to stay healthy. I haven't eaten any in over five years and have not felt the lack, at all. Taking it further, there is not a single plant, grain, tuber or fruit, that is absolutely necessary for a human to consume. Of course we do in fact eat scads of grains, veggies, and fruit, especially in this age of meat demonization and plant canonization.
"Scads" is a poor signifier for the carb-saturated Standard American Diet. "Awash in" more accurately states the case. Like virtually all plant foods, veggies have carbs, from a little to a lot, and "vegetables" like potatoes are nearly pure carbohydrates. Including sweet potatoes which are the current darling of many not-at-all-low-carb enthusiasts.
There is nothing the least bit magical about leafy green vegetables however much they are piously claimed to be "superfoods". The assertions that they are healthy is little more than wishful thinking and lifelong programming. Every parent for many generations is aware of how hard it is to get a kid to "eat your vegetables", often employing ever more mentally draconian methods to achieve this dubious goal. I have become convinced that youngsters' common distaste for green veggies is in fact a subconscious survival instinct. I consider all veggies, all plant foods really, as survival rations only and to be avoided unless no animal foods are available. My personal exception to this rule is coffee, which I have kicked for as much as a year without any noticeable improvement in my health, mental or physical.
Unquestionably, the worst plant food offender is sugar in all its many forms. Even vegans recognize how much this vile substance should be strictly avoided. Nevertheless, sugar is a plant food although one rarely encountered in concentrated form in the natural plant world. The main exception is honey, which is nominally an animal based food, but it is pure fructose and glucose and promotes ill health just as much as white crystalline table sugar. It has some benefits when used topically, but not when eaten. We are a nation of sugar addicts, something that few would deny, but few care enough about the problem to do anything about it.
Sugar in all its manifestations is nothing more than metabolic poison. It may be the best tasting poison available, but poison it nevertheless is. It doesn't even qualify as survival food. It is an anti-survival food, as the wildly burgeoning numbers of diabetics in this, and many other, countries are finding out. Going further, sugar, grains, fruit, and starchy vegetables are directly responsible for the incredible explosion of atherosclerosis and the many ghastly autoimmune conditions in the populations of the industrialized countries.
There are, supposedly, 200,000 plant species that are edible by humans without immediate harm. Worldwide we only eat about 200 species because most of the others either taste bad or are almost impossible to cultivate on a large scale. In any case, not one of them, domesticated or otherwise, has the slightest metabolic advantage over animal protein and fat. Humans are classified as "facultative carnivores", which means we can tolerate some plant foods, but we do not in general thrive on them. We simply have not escaped our ancestral evolutionary heritage as primarily eaters of animal foods. Animals, ruminant mammals especially, are perfectly adapted to converting plant matter into the type of protein and fat that enable and promote healthy human metabolisms. In short, don't eat your veggies. You're welcome.
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