There’s more to nutrition than just total energy intake, hitting macro targets, and including certain food sources in your diet.
Fascinatingly, you can take your nutrient status to another level by strategically eating certain food sources within the same meal to maximise micronutrient absorption!
Let’s take a large, colourful salad for example. A combination of leafy greens, carrots, tomatoes, capsicum, mushrooms, corn and cauliflower would contain plenty of fat soluble vitamins A,D,E & K.
However… there’s a caveat…
These vegetables themselves contain negligible levels of dietary fat. Therefore, since their nutrients are fat soluble, this infers that they need to be consumed alongside a sufficient dietary fat source to be absorbed (~10g +).
To take full advantage of the nutrient content within vegetables and maximise their potential for absorption and nourishment within the human body, it would be strategic to include a dietary fat source with this hypothetical salad! For example, olive oil, whole olives, avocado, cheese, nuts, seeds, whole eggs and the like.
As this infographic infers, there are many other nutrient-pairing examples that can help you get the most “bang for your buck” when trying to milk-out the nutrients from your food!
Let us know, do you purposefully apply any of these nutrient combinations to your own diet? If not, do you think you will in future?