These 6 Food Combinations Help Your Body Absorb More Nutrients

When it comes to healthy eating, we all know how important it is to eat well-balanced meals and foods high in antioxidants and other important vitamins and minerals.

We hear all about the most nutritious superfoods, and what to eat for an energizing breakfast, an energy-boosting lunch, and a light dinner.

What we often don’t hear about, and what many people don’t realize, is that certain foods need to be eaten together for our body to fully absorb their nutrients, and these healthy food combinations are what helps our body maximize its nutrient intake.

This concept, called “food synergy,” involves pairing foods together to increase their health effects. Thankfully, many foods that taste good together also work in tandem to increase your body’s absorption of important vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, so it should only encourage you to eat them together.

Next time you want to make your meal even healthier, try eating the following six healthy food combinations, which have been proven to be more nutritious when eaten together.

1. Tomatoes And Avocados

Tomatoes are high in an antioxidant called lycopene, and studies have found that when eaten with a healthy fat such as avocado, your body absorbs four times the amount of lycopene than when eaten alone.

2. Bananas And Almond Butter

Whenever you’re looking to build muscle through protein, it’s always important you add in a complex carbohydrate, which helps supply your muscles with energy in the form of glucose. Bananas are a quick and easy healthy source of carbohydrates, and can be eaten with almond butter or Greek yogurt.

3. Greens And Olive Oil

If you’re eating a salad, make sure you drizzle on some olive oil, as the healthy unsaturated fats found in oil not only help you absorb the nutrients from the greens, but they combine with the nitrates and nitrites to help lower blood pressure. 

4. Green Tea And Lemon

Lemon is a great way to flavor your tea, but it also contains vitamin C, which can help your body more readily absorb green tea’s antioxidants called catechins. Studies have found that consuming citrus juice with your tea can help your body absorb up to six times the amount of antioxidants with the addition of vitamin C.

5. Black Pepper And Turmeric

Turmeric is a powerful yellow spice that contains curcumin, an antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties. Eating black pepper with turmeric can increase the bioavailability of curcumin by 2000 percent.

6. Spinach And Citrus

Eating spinach with vitamin C helps increase your body’s absorption of iron. This is because spinach contains nonheme iron, a type of iron that is more difficult absorb than heme iron, which is found in other foods such as meat. Adding orange slices or lemon juice to a salad can help solve this.

Photo by SweetOnVeg