Nutrition Decoded
In the last few years, our interest in food has gone back to its roots. Instead of spending time calculating calories or painstakingly measuring items, we’re asking where our food is being sourced, how it’s being sourced, whether it’s organic and what benefits it offers our bodies. Nutrition has replaced dieting in terms of how we think about and approach what we consume. Gone are the days where weight loss was the single function of our dietary needs. Now longevity and wellness have become important factors in deciding what we put into our bodies.
Nutrition can loosely be defined as how our bodies relate to food. Good nutrition consists of foods packed with nutrients our bodies absorb and process which helps us function at the highest level. The absence of good nutrition means your body will to perform and operate optimally. Exercise and a balanced diet are a key cornerstone of balanced nutrition.
The following food groups are essential for good nutrition and wellness:
- Vegetables and legumes
- Fruit
- Healthy fats
- Grains
- Lean meat, seafood, eggs and meat substitutes
- Dairy and lactose-free alternatives
Sanitarium, a whole foods company in New Zealand, offers a glossary of nutrition terms you have and haven’t heard before. Some of them include the following:
- Additives: Additives are substances added to food to improve flavour, colour, and texture or to preserve foods to help extend the shelf life.
- Amino acids: Amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins. There are 20 different amino acids that combine in different sequences to make all the proteins required for metabolism and growth. Our body can manufacture 12 of these amino acids from recycled proteins; however the other eight need to be derived from the food we eat.
- Carotenoids/carotenes: Carotenoids are the orange, yellow and red pigments found in plant tissue that allow it to carry out photosynthesis. When eaten, these pigments provide vitamins and antioxidants that have many health benefits in humans. Beta-carotenes are a form of vitamin A.
- Essential fatty acids: Essential fatty acids are the fatty acids that the body cannot synthesise itself in sufficient quantities for physiological needs and must therefore be acquired from the diet. There are 2 essential fatty acids; linoleic acid which is an omega-6 and linolenic acid which is an omega-3 fat.
- Plant based eating: This is an alternative term that is used to describe vegetarian eating, or eating a diet that consists of predominantly plant foods.
- Vitamins: Vitamins are molecules that are needed in small amounts by the body for health and growth, and they must be obtained by the diet daily. The exceptions to this rule are vitamin D, which is made in the skin when exposed to sunlight and vitamin K, which can be synthesised by gut bacteria in small amounts. Vitamins play an essential role in releasing energy from food and in speeding up many chemical reactions that occur in the body every second. They also play important roles in the formation of body components, such as blood and bone as well as being antioxidants.