THE BIO-ACCESSIBILITY OF FOOD Is a vegan diet nutritionally sustainable? by Richard Rodrigo Most of us, if considering a vegan diet, will have done some research on what to eat to make sure you don’t die of a nutrition deficiency. This research is often met with surprise and relief, as fruits and vegetables contain a wide array of almost all the minerals and vitamins found in animal products. However, just because a food contains certain minerals or vitamins does not mean that you are necessarily able to digest them, and this can be even more so true for fruits and vegetables. A food’s ‘bio-accessibility’ is the proportion of a nutrient that can be released from the physicochemical matrix it is contained within, and then be absorbed by the body. The best way to work around
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the difficulties of bio-accessibility is to eat a wide range of foods, health professionals usually recommend people to eat more plant-foods to do this; but wouldn’t completely cutting out any other food group make gathering a full spectrum of essential nutrients more difficult? Plant foods do not all have the same bio-accessibility purely because they are all unique, and it is dependent on several factors. These include the state of the physicochemical matrix that the nutrient is contained within, as if it is not easily ruptured then very little of the nutrient will be released, as well as, the age, life stage, and chemical state of the nutrient, which determines whether and how much is going to be used, stored or excreted.