Most information around nutrition focusses on weight-loss but some people need to gain weight, sometimes very quickly, for various medical reasons, such as leading into cancer treatments or recovering from eating disorders. We’ve had a few questions around this lately, especially in relation to a whole-food low-carb diet so we thought we’d look at a few things you can do to help gain weight while on this type of diet.

Dietary fibre is a non-digestible carbohydrate that has a range of roles in the body and a range of health benefits. Some of these benefits include feeding "good" gut bacteria, reducing cholesterol and aiding weight-loss.

We all have those foods that we love eating together: peanut butter and banana, strawberries and chocolate, tomato and basil, but did you know that certain foods are best paired together to enhance the nutritional value of your food? How you combine your foods can have a significant impact on the benefit you get from them: increasing the absorption of important nutrients and boosting the effectiveness of antioxidants. Here are just some interesting food groupings that can be easily added to your diet.

Fat soluble vitamins are vitamins that dissolve in fats and oils. They are absorbed into your blood better when they are eaten with a fat source and can be stored in the liver and fatty tissues. Unlike water soluble vitamins, fat soluble vitamins are not lost when foods that contain them are cooked.

There are 4 fat soluble vitamins – vitamin A, D, E and K.

Vitamin C has many important roles in the body including being an antioxidant, boosting immunity, is needed for growth and development, helps the body absorb iron, can help manage blood pressure, may help lower the risk of heart disease and prevent gout so it's important to get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables high in vitamin C in the diet.

We’re moving on to our second to last micronutrient for Nutrition Tip Tuesday today – water soluble vitamins!

Zinc is an essential trace mineral that we need to consume through our food because our bodies can’t produce it or store it. Zinc is needed for a variety of processes in our body such as gene expression, DNA synthesis, enzyme reactions, immune function, protein synthesis, taste, smell, wound healing and growth. In fact, zinc is found in every one of the cells in our bodies and is the second most abundant trace mineral found in our bodies after iron. While zinc plays a role in a variety of different processes in the body, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the different ways zinc can help with immune response specifically.

As we continue on with our micronutrients theme, this week we are taking a look at trace minerals. Trace minerals are needed in smaller amounts than micro minerals which we looked at in our previous few Nutrition Tip Tuesday posts, but are still important for the proper functioning in your body.

Sulphur is found all around us, including in the soil that we grow our food in. It is part of every living tissue and is contained in the amino acids methionine and cysteine, found in protein molecules. By weight, sulphur is one of the most abundant mineral elements in the human body, with the body containing around 140 grams of sulphur for the average person and it is involved in many important functions in the body.

For Nutrition Tip Tuesday this week, we are looking at one of the micro-minerals that we outlined last week – magnesium!

EVOO is very good for you. Around 14% of the fatty acids in olive oil is saturated fat, 11% is polyunsaturated fat and the main fatty acid is a monounsaturated fat (check out our post from 2 weeks ago on monounsaturated fat if you’re after more info) called Oleic Acid which makes up 73% of the oil content.

Unlike other vitamins, vitamin D functions like a hormone and every cell in your body has a receptor for it. It's found in certain foods such as fatty fish (salmon, tuna, sardines), eggs & liver, but it is hard to get enough just from your diet. Our bodies can also produce vitamin D from cholesterol when skin is exposed to sunlight. However, because of the risks of sunburn and skin cancer, we need to be careful how much sun we get.