<em><strong>Your diet is only as good as what you absorb!</strong></em>

Unfortunately just eating the right foods might not be enough to ensure you are giving your body the vital nutrients it requires for normal healthy function. Researching the latest “super-food” and running to the supermarket to stock up on kale and quinoa will not necessarily mean you will get the reported benefits. The reason for this is pretty simple, just because a nutrient is present in a particular food, does not mean your body has the ability to absorb and utilize it.

You might wonder why this is? To get a better understanding of what is actually good for us we need to look at how the body absorbs the nutrition you need from food. Your digestive system is an incredible but very complex system. It not only needs to have the right nutrients available through good nutrition and food choices, it needs to be able to break them down into a form it can use. The ability of your body to absorb and use a particular nutrient from food is known as bioavailability. In simple terms, if you read that quinoa contains all the essential amino acids (required from diet), the question becomes, can they be broken down and passed into the blood through the digestive system? Can they be used by the body as they are needed? In the case of essential amino acids, this means building muscle tissue and repairing cells among other things.

This is where science comes in. The presence or absence of nutrients can be tested in a laboratory and the results can be reported as fact, quinoa does in fact contain all nine essential amino acids. However, if they have not been tested to prove they are bioavailable then it becomes more challenging to understand their nutritional value in the diet. Whilst eating whole grains is invariably good for you from a nutrition and fibre perspective, if you are relying on a particular food as a source of a nutrient, understanding its bioavailability in the body becomes very important. For this reason, the next time your newsfeed tells you to pack as much of the next big “super-food” into your work lunches, stop and look for scientific studies that show whether it is bioavailable, preferably ones that have been published in peer-reviewed papers and show consistent repeatable results.

Luckily the beloved quinoa seed, once only found high up in the Andes Mountains and trendy cafes, but now as common as couscous, has been tested and proven to be a good bioavailable dietary source of essential amino acids.

Happy eating (and absorbing)!

<strong><em>Kylie x</em></strong>