Nutrition: why we need food

The nutrition we get from the foods we eat is critical in determining both our current and future health. All foods contain nutrients, needed for healthy growth and development, body function and digestive processes. Food also supplies our body with energy with two-thirds of this energy going towards supporting the body's basic involuntary functions, such as breathing etc.

Energy and nutritional requirements

Your energy requirements depend on various factors, including age, gender, physical activity, muscle mass, body temperature, and whether you are still growing. Pregnancy, breast-feeding, menstruation, illness, infection, how much you eat or sleep, and hormone levels are additional factors. In...
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Food: essential building blocks of life

All foods - from apples and peas to wholemeal bread and ice cream - contain two main categories of nutrients, the macronutrients and the micronutrients.
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What is in the food we eat?

Foods are usually categorized as being primarily carbohydrate, protein, fat, or fibre. However, most foods contain all or most of these elements, in varying proportions, as well as traces of various vitamins and minerals.
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Why all the noise about nutrition?

Today we are literally bombarded with nutritional guidelines, suggestions and news, some of it contradictory. However, the more nutrition is studied, the more we realise that good nutrition has a lot to do with common sense…
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Getting a taste for taste…

Taste is mainly in your head, so this is where educating your taste buds begins. So how about teaching yourself how to acquire different tastes?
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Should you be eating more when it’s cold?

Many of us think that eating richer food will enable us to beat the cold. Sadly, this is not so, as dietician and nutritionist Béatrice Benavent Marco explains.
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Eat it: Get your ten a day!

“You should eat ten pieces of fruit and veg a day!”, or at least this is what a large advertising campaign was saying in 2000. Launched by fruit and vegetable producers, is the message of this campaign actually attainable? And how do you manage to get to this figure?
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Brain food: How to boost your memory

Can you really improve your memory through your diet? Yes, according to Jean-Marie Bourre, director of the INSERM research unit into Neuro-Pharmaco-Nutrition. Find out how in our interview.
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Balanced diet: Know your portions!

To unravel the confusion and give you a clearer idea of healthy eating, here are some examples and reference points to help you get a truly balanced diet.
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