Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagle the nutrition diva here with your quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous nutrition Diva listener Andrew writes, we can measure the amount of vitamins and minerals in a food,

but how do we know how much of that our bodies actually absorb.

If a banana contains 422 milligrams of potassium,

for example, do our bodies get 100% of that?

And what factors determine how much or how little nutrition we get from our food?

It's a great question.

And there are in fact a lot of things that influence what percentage of vitamins and minerals are absorbed,

such as the other foods you eat at the same meal,

how the foods are prepared,

drugs or supplements you might be taking,

even your age, and the time of day.

Taking all of these into account, you might absorb anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of a given nutrient from a given food.

Before I get into some specific examples, however, I want to clear up a common misunderstanding about the nutrient

content of foods.

The USDA maintains a huge database of the nutritional composition of thousands of foods.

If you look up banana in the national nutrient database,

you will see that a medium banana contains

422 milligrams of potassium,

just like Andrew said.

But that is just an average.

In this case, it was based on 14 different samples.

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