Macronutrients? Micronutrients? What???

Macronutrients? Micronutrients? What???

      Fats, proteins and carbohydrates. You have probably heard of these. These are known as “macronutrients”. Your body needs all of these macronutrients in order to keep you alive.  Leave out a macronutrient for too long, and your health will take a dramatic downturn. “Micronutrients” are vitamins, minerals and fibre. You have probably heard of these, too.  Micronutrients have various functions in the body. Generally, it is thought that more micronutrients means better health, and fewer micronutrients means poorer health. Things that grow tend to be good sources of micronutrients, like broccoli. Things that are processed tend to be poor sources of micronutrients, like potato chips.

     Some “health” articles advise you to get rid of one or more macronutrients from your diet. Get rid of fats. Get rid of carbs. You have heard this. It is a very simplistic approach to nutrition, to say the least. You need all of the macronutrients. You need some fats, and some protein, and some carbohydrates. That is the truth. It is entirely possible that, in our modern society, we consume too much of one or another of these, more than is needed for health. Or maybe we just consume too much food, period.

     Now about calories. A calorie is a unit of heat, representing the amount of energy a particular food will give you (to be used by the body, or to be stored as bodyfat), or the amount of energy you will expend doing a particular exercise. Although there is some scientific basis to this calorie business, in most cases the numbers are thrown around haphazardly by the so-called experts that I tend to refer to as the “talking heads” . You see these people on TV telling what their particular magic-potion-of-the-day is that will instantly improve your life and your health. These numbers are useful mostly as a basis for comparison, such as, you will burn more calories walking than you will sitting still. You will take in more calories eating potato chips than you will drinking water.  You will no doubt take in more calories eating potato chips for half an hour than you will burn if you take a half-hour walk.

     The “calories in – calories out” theory of diet and exercise says that you need to “burn” more calories than you take in, in order to lose weight. You would need to expend 3500 more calories than you consume in order to lose one pound of bodyfat. While I am not disputing the truth of these statements, I do object to the way this information is usually put into practice. The supermarket shelves are now full of “diet” products, lo-cal this and that, which the commercials present to us as tasty and desirable and “only 100 calories!”, implying that we can eat all we want and be happy and thin. Well, not quite, in my opinion.

     This brings us back to the macronutrients and micronutrients. Fats are not bad. Carbohydrates are not bad. Proteins are not good. These things are just essential.  Micronutrients are essential. Try to choose your foods so that you get a lot  -- and a good variety -- of vitamins, minerals and fibre from the foods that you eat. Sometimes you can use the labels on foods to determine this, but sometimes you need to use reference materials such as the “Nutrition Almanac” to discover which micronutrients are in which foods.  Corrine T. Netzer’s “The Complete Book of Food Counts” will give you the macronutrients, sodium, cholesterol, fibre and calories in a wide array of foods, but no vitamins or minerals.

     What to eat, for maximum health? Here is a helpful equation:  health equals micronutrients divided by calories. What this means is that, for good health, you should choose foods that have lots of micronutrients (basically vitamins, minerals, and fibre) and these foods should have few calories. The more micronutrients there are, and the fewer calories there are, the healthier you will be. For example, a baked yam would give you a big number of micronutrients divided by a relatively small number of calories, which would equal a bigger number for health. This would be a bigger number (and therefore better health) than would result from a bag of potato chips, which would provide a small number of micronutrients divided by a big number of calories.