Understanding the complexities of nutrition and the complete breakdown of the nutrients contained in your food can be both complicated and overwhelming.

With thousands of apps, blogs, forums, websites, advertisements and food suppliers presenting conflicting information with regards to what is contained in foods, and providing commercially driven definitions of what constitutes a healthy diet, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Is low fat with high sugar really the better option? Do processed packaged foods provide better nutrients than unprocessed? Does it matter how the plants were grown and which country they came from? Is organic really any better?

All these questions do impact the quality of the food we consume, and – as stated by esteemed writer and teacher, Michal Pollan – you are what you eat, but you are what you eats eats too.

How can I be more informed?

Talking of questions, a good friend of mine recently asked:

Where do I start when it comes to understanding what is in the food I eat? How can I be more informed about what I’m really putting into my body?

So here is a piece – a road map – of how to start the process to understanding what nutrients are hidden in your food. Whether you take snippets of information for this or follow the process whole, having some understanding of what’s really in your food is vital. 

How to find out what nutrients are hidden in your food

Food can be comforting, bring people together, have cultural significance and provide happiness through the presentation of carefully constructed flavours. More important than all these things combined though, is that food provides essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients that are required to sustain life.

Many food regulatory bodies around the world, such as those in the United States, the UK and Australia, require Nutrition Information Panels (NIPs) to be included on the labels of packaged foods.

Labels on packaged foods

In Australia, Food Standards Australia New Zealand is a statutory authority, which develops the Food Standards Code to inform companies on how they need to present their foods. Most of the common NIPs you will see on food labels look like this:

This information provides an average quantity of the macro nutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrate) and a breakdown of the saturated fat, sugars and sodium, both per serving and per 100g (or mL, as appropriate). The Energy in Kilojoules (kJ) is calculated by the following equations:

1g protein = 16.7kJ
1g fat = 37.7kJ
1g carbohydrate = 16.7kJ

Although this provides some insight in to the nutrient content of food, there are still many gaps to understanding the complete picture.

The other nutrients or biologically active substances sections can only be included if certain requirements are met, both based on the type of food and the quantity of the ingredient.

For example, to declare that the food contains a good source of Vitamin C, the food would need to meet certain requirements and provide at least 25% of the RDI for that ingredient.

There are generally a few different ways that numbers you see in NIPs are reached:

1. The finished product is tested for the selected nutrient content
2. The nutrient content is based on the testing results of the individual ingredients
3. Credible resources are searched and used to base the information .

Factors that affect the nutritional quality of your food

The nutrient content of foods is always changing. Multiple factors influence this value, such as the time of year the food is picked, the country and soil quality it is grown in, and the manufacturing process.

A good example to explore is Brazil nuts. Brazil nuts are often presented as a good source of selenium, but a number of factors can influence the final content.

The amount of selenium contained in the nuts depend on the location they are grown, the amount of selenium in the soil, soil pH, the amount of organic matter in the soil, and whether the selenium is in a form that is suitable for plant uptake.^{1, 2}.

In reality, this means that 100g of nuts grown in Brazil can have a completely different quantity of selenium from 100g of nuts grown in China, New Zealand, Australia or the UK.

If you want to investigate this further, some credible sources are:

1. FSANZ Nutrient Tables³
2. AUSNUT Food Nutrient Database⁴
3. USDA Food Composition Databases⁵

By searching for the ingredient name (in this case Brazil nuts), we can see what nutrients are contained in this food and determine the quantity that would be provided in a reasonable serve.

By then searching for an approximate weight of a Brazil nut, we can see that 2 nuts weigh approximately 10g. Therefore, the values provided for 100g equate to approximately 20 nuts.

FSANZ states 100g (i.e. approximately 20 nuts) provides 920 mcg of selenium. So if we were to eat 6 nuts, that would be 276 mcg selenium (920÷20 X 6).

AUSNUT states that 100g contain 1917mcg of Selenium. This means that 6 nuts would contain 575mcg of selenium, almost twice as much.

So which is correct?

Making educated choices about nutritional claims

Both these values are correct in their own right as factors such as geographical variability and the other components influencing selenium content mentioned above can influence the final results.

Essentially, based off the testing the agencies have performed, the results are presented to reflect that particular batch.

It’s interesting to note that the USDA does not provide a value for selenium. This further supports the complexities that can be involved in finding this information out and shows that we need to use some common sense or perform further research to work out what is really in our food.

How to find out nutrient profiles of unlabelled foods

Non-packaged food or fruit and vegetables provide an additional challenge if we want to work out exactly what we are consuming.

The process involved is as follows:

1. Write down your meal or recipe.
2. Work out how much of each ingredient you are consuming. If you’re not sure, a simple method is search for the weight of this quantity. i.e. weight of 2 cups of baby spinach.
3. Refer to one of the nutrient references databases above and see what’s in 100g of that ingredient.
4. Multiply this value by the quantity you are consuming (e.g. for 60g of spinach, multiply the 100g values by 0.6 to provide the quantity of each nutrient in 60g). I use an Excel spreadsheet to work out the total value consumed. Send a message if you’d like a copy to help get you started. 

That will provide you with the most closely accurate nutrient profile possible without testing.

The process for discovering what nutrients are in your lunch

Let’s try this with a simple but nutritious lunch time salad:

RECIPE
2 cups of organic baby spinach: 60g
1 organic carrot: 75g
5 organic cherry tomatoes
½ organic cucumber: 75g
1 small handful of organic almonds: 30g
½ organic avocado
1 boiled organic egg: 60g

If the above meal came packaged, you’d likely see a NIP as follows:

By performing the above process, we can work out that the meal prepared contains all these additional nutrients:

• 18g Protein 
• 13g Dietary Fibre 
• 186mg Calcium
• 34mcg Iodine
• 5.5mg Iron
• 177mg Magnesium
• 17.4mcg Selenium
• 3.1mg Zinc
• 0.3mg Vitamin B1
• 0.9mg Vitamin B2
• 4.5mg Vitamin B3
• 1.8mg Vitamin B5
• 0.6mg Vitamin B6
• 1.3mcg Vitamin B12
• 24mcg Biotin
• 206mcg Folate
• 6mg Beta carotene 
• 57mg Vitamin C
• 16.4mg Vitamin E

Over to you

I put this nutrient breakdown together to help my friend work out what is really in her diet and enable her to start seeing which nutrients are being consumed in sufficient quantities and which nutrients may not be adequately provided.

I hope this information provides value for you too and starts to reveal the complexities of what is really contained in your food, so you can be more empowered to make informed food choices. By doing this, you can start to eat based on what you need, and not just indulge in what you feel like.

When you see what is really in your food, it gives you a greater appreciation for the choices you make.

References & further resources

1. National institute of Health Office of Dietary Supplements. Selenium — Health Professional Fact Sheet. 2016. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Selenium-HealthProfessional
2. Silva Junior EC, Wadt LHO, Silva KE, et al. Natural variation of selenium in Brazil nuts and soils from the Amazon region. Chemosphere. 2017;188:650-658. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2017.08.158.
3. FSANZ. Food Standards Australia New Zealand Nutrient Tables. http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/science/monitoringnutrients/nutrientables/nuttab/Pages/default.aspx. Published 2010. Accessed February 22, 2018.
4. FSANZ. AUSNUT Food Nutrient Database. http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/science/monitoringnutrients/ausnut/ausnutdatafiles/Pages/foodnutrient.aspx. Published 2013. Accessed February 22, 2018.
5. USDA. USDA Food Composition Databases. https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/. Published 2016. Accessed February 22, 2018.
6. Michael Pollan (writer, thought leader). https://michaelpollan.com/about Accessed February 22, 2018.

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