Are we getting enough nutrients?

An interesting question? I expect a lot of us who eat 3 home cooked meals a day consider that our diets are healthy and provide the right balance of nutrients for our needs.

I've recently been given a book by my friend Liz, called "Potatoes Not Prozac" by Kathleen Desmaisons, which addresses sugar sensitivity. What's this you may ask - I did. It's the name given for a certain body chemistry which leads us to crave sweet foods. Sugar sensitive people are the ones who have an emotional response to the idea of eating chocolate or cake - you'll have an idea if this is you or not.

Anyway, the idea of the book is to manage this through diet. I can't comment fully on this yet because I'm only halfway through the book, but it partially involves getting enough protein, which is what I would like to talk about.

Having had no real idea whether I was ever getting the "right" amount of nutrients in my diet, I decided to look into this by reading my labels and surfing the web. And to my surprise I noticed that a lot of foods had much lower protein amounts that I would have guessed. In fact so low, that I was confused as to how I was going to get enough protein into my diet to fulfil the requirements of the book's process.

This was until I was discussing the problem with Liz and she was quoting much higher protein values for eggs than I'd researched. On further discussion, I realised that Liz was quoting values for organic eggs and I was quoting values for standard eggs. Standard eggs were listed as 6g protein per egg and the organic eggs were listed as 12g protein per egg.

That's quite a difference when you think that a couple of eggs for breakfast seems fairly normal, but if you had to eat double that because you were only getting half the protein, you'd probably feel you were overeating.

I decided to look into this further on my weekly shop today. The normal Feta cheese is rated as 6g protein per 100g but organic Feta cheese as 16g protein per 100g; an even bigger difference.

This has made me wonder how many people who feel they cannot afford organic are deficient in nutrients and whether, in fact, buying the cheaper food is actually a false economy.