Nutrientelligence

I intend for this to be a fairly basic but informative post regarding macronutrients- what they are and what bits of information about each of them are useful to know so that this can be applied practically to one's diet and saved in your nutrition knowledge bank as a tool for making future food choices and plans. Roughly speaking all food can be broken down into constituent macro- (from Greek makros "long, large") and micro- (from Greek smikros "small, little, petty, trivial, slight"... seems slightly harsh) nutrients. This post will focus on the macronutrients.  As I am sure most people are abundantly aware foods are made up of Carbohydrates, Fats and Proteins, these are the 3 macronutrients, the big dogs so to speak. The nutrients big (macro) enough and bold enough to make it on to the back of every food packet across the land, and sea. "But what about fibre?" I hear you ask, well technically not a macronutrient and I will discuss that later, vitami...

Unaware as I may be regarding when or how it first started, what I do know is that I have had a stronger than your average interest in diet and nutrition since I was fairly young. I was never particularly overweight, always verging more on the scrawny side throughout my childhood and teenage years. I struggled a lot with self-image and was always overly self-aware and self-conscious, particularly as a teenager and especially through college and University. When trying to think back to a more nutrition naive mind- one not filled almost to the brim with information, opinions, facts, "facts", evidence, beliefs, contradictions, dogma, teachings, musings, and pure nonsense, the time I could best think to was when I first started University. I would've been 18 at the time, and I was a relatively intelligent guy, not sure about switched on, but as I said had always been fairly interested in being healthy and aware that diet was a key function of this (again no idea from where th...