Nutrients From Diet

Frequently Asked Questions:

How can I use this site?

Our site allows a person to get a better understanding of the necessity of consuming enough nutrients in one's diet. Through a unique assessment, a nutrient analysis is done to compare what you are consuming with the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs). From this, you can focus on eating more of the missing dietary nutrients. Our program gives you both examples and amounts of foods high in a given nutrient as well as whole-food supplement recommendations.

What is the source of this information?

The United States Department of Agriculture is the source for all of the food descriptions, portion sizes, nutrient content and Recommended Dietary Allowances.

What is a whole-food supplement?

Whole-food supplements are made by concentrating foods for use in supplements. When processed correctly, they supply a multitude of the plant's components. Foods provide nutrients that work synergistically. They work together to provide you with optimal nutrition for good health.

What is food?

Food n. 1. that which is eaten to sustain life, provide energy, and promote the growth and repair of tissues; nourishment [Old English foda, nourishment]. According to this definition, many people are living on something other than food.

What is a nutrient?

A nutrient is a food substance that an organism needs to live and grow or is used in an organism's metabolism, which must be taken in from its environment.

What are essential nutrients?

An essential nutrient is a nutrient required for normal body functioning that cannot be made by the body and must be obtained from a dietary source. Some categories of essential nutrients include vitamins, dietary minerals, essential fatty acids and essential amino acids.

Is there a problem in taking too many nutrients?

Yes, many essential nutrients are toxic in large doses (hypervitaminosis). Vitamin poisoning, hypervitaminosis or vitamin overdose refers to a condition of high storage levels of vitamins, which can lead to toxic symptoms. Nutrients from food always come in small amounts.

Is there a problem in taking too few nutrients?

Avitaminosis is any disease caused by chronic or long-term vitamin deficiency or caused by a defect in metabolic conversion, such as tryptophan to niacin. In extreme deficiencies over a long period of time, researchers have found the following classic diseases from vitamin deficiencies.

What is a vitamin?

A vitamin is a compound required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism. A compound is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism and must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional both on the circumstances and the particular organism. Vitamins have diverse biochemical functions, including function as hormones (e.g., vitamin D) and mediators of cell signaling and regulators of cell and tissue growth and differentiation (e.g., vitamin A). The largest number of vitamins (e.g., B complex vitamins) function as precursors for enzyme cofactors (coenzymes), which help act as catalysts in metabolism. When acting as part of a catalyst, vitamins are bound to enzymes. For example, biotin is part of enzymes involved in making fatty acids. Vitamins also act as coenzymes to carry chemical groups between enzymes. Although these roles in assisting enzyme reactions are vitamins' best-known function, the other vitamin functions are equally important.

History of vitamins

The value of eating a certain food to maintain health was recognized long before vitamins were identified. The ancient Egyptians knew that feeding a patient liver would help cure night blindness, an illness now known to be caused by a vitamin A deficiency. The advancement of ocean voyage during the Renaissance resulted in prolonged periods without access to fresh fruits and vegetables, making illnesses from vitamin deficiency common among ship's crews. In 1749, the Scottish surgeon James Lind discovered that citrus foods helped prevent scurvy, a particularly deadly disease in which collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the gums, severe pain and death. In 1753, Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, which recommended using lemons and limes to avoid scurvy, which was adopted by the British Royal Navy. This led to the nickname Limey for sailors of that organization. Lind's discovery, however, was not widely accepted by individuals in the Royal Navy's Arctic expeditions in the nineteenth century, where it was widely believed that scurvy could be prevented by practicing good hygiene, regular exercise, and by maintaining the morale of the crew while on board, rather than by a diet of fresh food. As a result, Arctic expeditions continued to be plagued by scurvy and other deficiency diseases. In the early twentieth century, when Robert Falcon Scott made his two expeditions to the Antarctic, the prevailing medical theory was that scurvy was caused by "tainted" canned food. In East Asia, where polished white rice was the common staple food of the middle class, beriberi resulting from lack of vitamin B was endemic. In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro, a British trained medical doctor of the Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice, but not among crews of Western navies and officers who consumed a Western-style diet. Kanehiro initially believed that lack of protein was the chief cause of beriberi. With the support of the Japanese Navy, he experimented using crews of two battleships; one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew members with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Kanehiro and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause of beriberi. This was confirmed in 1897, when Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch physician and pathologist, discovered that feeding unpolished rice instead of the polished variety to chicken helped to prevent beriberi in the chicken. The following year, English biochemist Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors" - in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc. - that were necessary for the functions of the human body. Hopkins was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Christiaan Eijkman for their discovery of several vitamins. In 1910, Japanese scientist Umetaro Suzuki succeeded in extracting a water-soluble complex of micronutrients from rice bran and named it aberic acid. He published this discovery in a Japanese scientific journal. When the article was translated into German, the translation failed to state that it was a newly discovered nutrient, a claim made in the original Japanese article, and hence his discovery failed to gain publicity. Polish biochemist Kazimierz Funk isolated the same complex of micronutrients in 1912 and proposed the complex be named "Vitamine" (a portmanteau of "vital amine"). The name soon became synonymous with Hopkins' "accessory factors," and by the time it was shown that not all vitamins were amines, the word was already ubiquitous. In 1920, British biochemist Jack Cecil Drummond proposed that the final e be dropped to deemphasize the "amine" reference after the discovery that vitamin C had no amine component. Throughout the early 1900s, the use of deprivation studies allowed scientists to isolate and identify a number of vitamins. Initially, lipid from fish oil was used to cure rickets in rats, and the fat-soluble nutrient was called "antirachitic A". Thus, the first "vitamin" bioactivity ever isolated, which cured rickets, was initially called "vitamin A", although confusingly the bioactivity of this compound is now called vitamin D. What we now call "vitamin A" was identified in fish oil as a separate factor that was inactivated by ultraviolet light. In 1931, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Hungarian phsiologist, and a fellow researcher Joseph Svirbely determined that "hexuronic acid" was actually vitamin C and noted its antiscorbutic activity. In 1937, Szent-Gyorgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery. In 1943, American biochemist Edward Adelbert Doisy and Danish biochemist Henrik Dam were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of vitamin K and its chemical structure. For the most part, vitamins are obtained with food, but a few are obtained by other means. For example, microorganisms in the intestine - commonly known as "gut flora" - produce vitamin K and biotin, while one form of vitamin D is synthesized in the skin with the help of the natural ultraviolet wavelength of sunlight. Humans can produce some vitamins from precursors they consume. Examples include vitamin A, produced from beta carotene, and niacin, from the amino acid tryptophan. Because human bodies do not store most vitamins, humans must consume them regularly to avoid deficiency. Human bodily stores for different vitamins vary widely; vitamins A, D, and B₁₂ are stored in significant amounts in the human body, mainly in the liver, and an adult human's diet may be deficient in vitamins A and B₁₂ for many months before developing a deficiency condition. Vitamin B₃ is not stored in the human body in significant amounts, so stores may only last a couple of weeks.

What is a mineral?

Minerals essentially come from one of two sources, either inorganic, being from rocks, clays, seabeds etc., or organic, which means that the minerals have been processed through a plant metabolism. For this reason, minerals that come from plant sources containing the full spectrum of minerals would be the best source for man. Organic minerals (plant-based) have been transformed from the inorganic minerals, which are present in the soil.

What are essential fatty acids?

Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that cannot be made within an organism and therefore must be obtained from the diet. There are two families of EFAs: omega-3 and omega-6. They were originally designated as Vitamin F when they were discovered as essential nutrients in 1923. Omega 6 fatty acids play a role in normal growth, supporting skin integrity, kidney function and child development. Omega 3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, increase circulation, decrease triglycerides and affect many other health issues.

What are essential amino acids?

Essential amino acids are so called not because they are more important to life than the others but because the body does not synthesize them, making it essential to include them in one's diet in order to obtain them. Amino acids are critical to life and have a variety of roles in metabolism. One particularly important function is as the building blocks of proteins, which are chains of amino acids.

What are RDAs?

RDAs (Recommended Dietary Allowances) are a set of estimated nutrient allowances established by the National Academy of Sciences. It is updated periodically to reflect current scientific knowledge.

Some of the foods I eat are not included in the questions

The questions we ask cover the majority of foods high in nutrients. If your food is not present, its nutrient levels may be too low or there is no known data on its nutrient content. Please pick the most similar food that compares or mention it to your Health Coach.

Can I take the quiz multiple times?

Yes, you should take the quiz again and again to track your progress. Your Health Coach can graph trends to determine progress over time.

How accurate is the calculation?

It is fairly accurate; however, our program does not take into account if your food is organic or commercial. Organic foods have more nutrients than commercial.

Does everyone's level of nutrients follow the RDAs?

No; the RDAs are for healthy people. All sorts of health conditions can affect a person's nutritional needs. Medication, stress, lack of sleep, refined foods, refined grains, estrogen therapy, drugs, etc. can all deplete nutrients in the body.

How much of a certain food satisfies RDA amounts?

Please click here to see some examples of what you would have to consume to fulfill your RDA's for various nutrients.