Healthy eating

The importance of consuming fruit and vegetables to stay healthy is now well known, as is the recommendation to consume at least 5 servings of these per day. These 5 portions must make up at least 600g of food, and are usually divided into 3 portions of fruit and 2 portions of vegetables. In daily life, eating your recommended intake every day is not always an easy task, especially since 600g is just the minimum, and actually, "the more you eat, the better"! In this respect, replacing a portion of fruit with a portion of fruit juice may seem like [...]

Lycopene is a bioactive component, packed with biological assets that are great for the human body. It is found in  tomatoes, watermelons ,  pink grapefruits, apricots, and pink guavas. The amount of lycopene in a tomato varies according to its variety and ripeness, and can range from 30 to over 70 mg of lycopene per kg of fresh ripe tomatoes. Lycopene is a member of the  carotenoid family, just like beta-carotene. Unlike the latter, however, lycopene is not converted into vitamin A by our body, so it is referred to as a "non-provitamin A carotenoid". The human body is unable to synthesise lycopene [...]

When we use the word "milk", in Italy at least, we mean cow's milk, but the term is also used for its other variants (sheep's milk, buffalo's milk etc) Chemically speaking, milk is an emulsion of oil in water, with varying sizes of globules of fat depending on the animal species, which also determines the different composition that milk can have: In all cases, water is the main component; Fats, mostly saturated, are the main energy source found in milk, generally in the form of triglycerides. In commercial whole milk taken from cows, there are 3.5 - 3.7 g of [...]

The word "meat" refers to all the edible parts of warm-blooded animals, which also includes internal organs, innards or entrails. In everyday language and in many regulations, the term excludes fish and fishery products, so it is actually the flesh of the fish that is referred to with the term "fish". According to the European Council, meat is divided into different categories according to the animal it comes from: domestic ungulates (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, horses); poultry; rabbits, hares and rodents; game. Meat is also commonly categorised according to its colour: red meat (ox, horse, mutton and some birds like [...]

Foods are defined as "complex matrices" because they are made up of many different components. The main components are nutrients: macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates and fats), micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and water. Nutrients can have different qualities and be found in different amounts in different foods, and this defines not only their nutritional value but also their organoleptic qualities. All foods are mixtures of different nutrients, with very few exceptions such as table sugar, which only contains sucrose. Even oils, which are usually thought to consist only of fats, actually contain other nutrients such as vitamin E. To add the complexity [...]