High-tech hits home The words bioavailable and bioaccessible get thrown around a lot in medicine. They sound complex (which is probably why the "experts" like to use them so often), but all it really means is how much of something your body can benefit from. Food, for example. A grapefruit could have the nutritional equivalent of truckloads of vitamin C, but your body may not actually be able to use or absorb the entire amount. So only a portion of that vitamin C is bioavailable to your body. The main problem with bioaccessibility, though, is that it's extremely complicated, time consuming, and expensive to study because it requires using human subjects. So for most foods, there's no real way of knowing exactly what you're getting from them. But that could soon change. On October 13 the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry released an abstract on the web in which researchers reported on a new method they've developed to test the bioavailability of nutrients in various foods. They created an in vitro model that simulates human digestion, and from this model they were able to measure how much of certain nutrients would actually be absorbed from different foods. The researchers looked specifically at vitamin E and found that there were significant differences in how much of it was absorbed depending on the particular food it came from. If the scientists continue to use this approach to study other foods and nutrients it could be a huge breakthrough for all of us and will hopefully take a lot of the guesswork out of those trips to the supermarket. It will help us determine just how much nutritional bang we're getting for our buck. We'll also know -- once and for all -- when it's worth it from a nutritional standpoint (pesticides and other issues not withstanding) to buy organic. And we'll learn which "fortified" foods (if any) are really living up to their claims. Basically, this discovery is a grocery shopper's dream-come-true, saving our time, money, and health. | 
