When it comes to food, we are either consuming more than our body’s needs or cutting out entire food groups (in order to follow GM, Keto, Atkins and various other diets, to lose weight).
Both of these can lead to trouble – obesity or nutritional deficiencies, or sometimes both!
For maintaining good health, proper intake of nutrients is essential and that too in the right quantity. This is where ‘Quantified Nutrition’ comes in.
To understand this concept simply, consider this – ‘Nutrition’ means feeding the body the right foods, and so ‘Quantified Nutrition’ means feeding it in the right quantity too.
Your weight loss attempts become easier and you start to get a sense of how much of different food groups you should consume on a daily basis.
What to do in Quantified Nutrition?
The concept of ‘Quantified Nutrition’ is related to counting calories of the foods you are consuming as well as eating the required quantity from major nutrient groups. This means, along with knowing how much you are eating (calories), you have to pay attention to what you are eating too (completing nutrient requirement).
A little theory on nutrients, before we get to the fun part of how you can use ‘Quantified Nutrition’ in real life:
The nutrients we eat are divided into two main categories based on the body’s requirements,
- micronutrients (viz required in smaller quantities by the body, like vitamins, minerals) and
- macronutrients or macros (viz required in larger quantities by the body, like carbohydrates, fats, and proteins)
We can understand how to apply the concept of ‘Quantified Nutrition’ better, through an example. Consider you are eating a piece of bread with butter. Since we are quantifying, let us say we made sure to measure how much butter on a weighing scale – we used 10gms.
Using the Nutrition Facts section, we find the information we need about a slice of bread and 10g of butter.
Source: FITTR Nutrition Facts for Butter
Source: FITTR Nutrition Facts for Butter
From the data on these two food items, you know that by eating your buttered slice of bread, your body will be getting
- 138 kCal (i.e. 66 from bread + 72 from butter) of energy (calories),
- 12g of Carbohydrates,
- 2g of Protein and
- 9g of Fats
Do you know how much energy your body needs? Or how much of each of these macronutrients should you ideally consume in a day? That’s for another article that we will link soon.
So, in its simplest form, quantifying our nutrition involves balancing the macronutrient (or macros) within the overall calories we consume in a day.
