Imagine your body is like a well-stocked pantry filled with storage containers, each holding vitamins, minerals, amino acids, glucose and fat—everything you need to nourish and fuel your body.
The pantry has:
- large buckets holding bulky, frequently-used items – these are the macronutrients (i.e., protein, fat and carbs),
- smaller jars containing the minerals, and
- infinitesimal canisters of vitamins, so small that the human eyes can scarcely see them and their vital contents.
Imagine each storage vessel inside you; the ‘perfect human pantry’ is clearly labelled for easy organisation, use, and efficiency. As containers empty, your body immediately senses which ones need refilling.
Your super-efficient survival instincts put in an order for what it needs, and your appetite drives you to search for the foods and meals that contain the macronutrients and micronutrients on the shopping list.
This article will introduce you to how you can gamify nutrition to ensure your body has all the resources to thrive.
- Welcome to Gamified Nutrition!
- Your Dual-fueled Engine
- Protein
- Minerals
- Vitamins
- Your Nutrient Dashboard
- The Process of Nutritional Optimisation
- Your Avatar
- Meet the Monsters
- Precision Nutrient Filling
- Levelling Up to The Optimal Nutrient Intakes
- Winning a place on the leaderboard
- The Optimal Nutrient Intakes
- How Can I Level Up from the DRIs to ONI Targets?
- Levelling Up Your Nutrient Targets
- See Beyond the Numbers
- Where Should I Start?
- More
Welcome to Gamified Nutrition!
Want to play a game?
Yes?
OK.
But first, you need to learn the rules.
The two largest buckets in your human ‘pantry’ are your fuel tanks – glucose and fat.
They could be likened to Monopoly’s Boardwalk and Park Place because they are the most expensive to own, fill, maintain, and operate.
The biggest bucket contains fat, and the second largest holds glucose. While each fuel is ideal in different circumstances, either fuel can be used to meet your body’s energy requirements.
Your Dual-fueled Engine
Understanding the capacity of the fuel tanks that fuel your body’s dual-energy metabolism is critical to play this game with expert skill.
You can store about 2,000 calories of energy as glucose in your liver, muscles, and blood. That is, about a day’s worth of energy fuel.
Meanwhile, you can stockpile a massive—but not infinite—amount of energy in your fat tank.
- A very lean person might maintain around 40,000 calories worth of fat (4 kg or 10 lbs.) on their body.
- Meanwhile, a larger person could store up to half a million calories worth of energy as body fat!
The image below shows that our fat and glucose fuel tanks are separate but somewhat interconnected – your body can convert one form of fuel to another if necessary. However, due to Oxidative Priority and your limited capacity to store glucose, your body has to use any excess glucose before metabolising the fat on your body and in your blood. The practical implication is that you must first use the fuels stored upstream before accessing your body fat.
Protein
Protein can be used as fuel in an emergency, but it’s an inefficient energy source.
A significant amount of energy (20 to 35%) is lost in converting dietary protein to energy for use in your body. Rather than energy, your body primarily uses the protein you eat to build and repair your muscles, make neurotransmitters, and perform many unique and critical body functions.
The macronutrient known as protein is comprised of nine essential micronutrients – amino acids – as illustrated in the image below.
These amino acids identified above are ‘essential’ because the body can’t make them from other nutrients you eat.
Minerals
Minerals are smaller than amino acids, and they’re measured in micrograms, milligrams, or grams, depending on the mineral.
Minerals help transfer energy throughout the body, similar to how wires in your car distribute power from the battery. Minerals also work synergistically with vitamins to enable you to use the energy from fats and carbs.
Vitamins
Vitamins are the organic compounds the body needs to carry out metabolic processes. Like minerals, essential vitamins cannot be produced by the body and, therefore, must be obtained from food.
Most vitamins are needed in smaller amounts than minerals, and some can only be measured in micrograms. But tiny as they are, vitamins are still essential!
The B vitamins often come bundled with protein, while others are more plentiful in plant-based foods (e.g., folate, K1, and C).
Your Nutrient Dashboard
This dashboard screenshot from Cronometer shows fuel in the form of fats and carbohydrates alongside the essential micronutrients. With this dashboard view, you can easily see which ‘buckets’ are full and which need to be topped up with nutrients to prevent deficiencies and for your body to function optimally.
The Process of Nutritional Optimisation
Keeping ALL the nutrient containers topped up without overfilling your fuel tanks becomes like a game of Whack-A-Mole. While you’re busy focusing on topping up one nutrient ‘bucket’ (without overfilling your carb and fat energy ‘buckets’), other nutrients pop up as higher priorities.
It’s not easy to balance your diet at the micronutrient level! But don’t worry! As you continue to play, your skills will improve.
Over time, you become better at filling the buckets and lose yourself in the process of dialling in the harder-to-find micronutrients. Then, one day, you look up and realise that with your perfect score, you’ve become a mini-me of the high rollers who do best at this ‘game.’
Congratulations! You’re a winner!
Your Avatar
As you fill the buckets, your avatar grows in strength and vitality (not to mention good looks).
Eventually, you will have scored so many bonus nutrients that your avatar can reproduce cute avatar babies.
And, so, the cycle continues.
Unless, of course, you interrupt the storybook ‘happily ever after’ by failing to keep your containers topped up, and your appetite becomes an out-of-control dumpster fire!
Meet the Monsters
Like those lurking in the scariest, creepiest games, ‘Fill the Nutrient-Container Game’ has a Monster–an Ogre’ Big Boss,’ an Unholy Umpire–that you must keep happy by following the rules!
Most terrifying of all is the Hunger Monster (aka your lizard brain, Lizzy, or your amygdala). If you lose focus or fudge your scores, Lizzy roars out (most frequently at night), and you binge indiscriminately.
When challenged with basic survival, all Lizzy cares about is filling your energy fuel tanks with as much fuel (in the form of fat and carbohydrate) as possible so your avatar doesn’t die.
To make things worse, Lizzy also knows that she needs to fill the other vitamin, mineral and protein reserves, so she gorges on even more of the fat+carb combo foods trying to eat enough of all the micronutrients for your avatar to survive.
But it’s a hopeless, hapless strategy. Sadly, without Lizzy attending to the other buckets, your avatar loses strength, health, and vitality (not to mention becomes pudgy and lethargic) over time.
Game over?
Nope!
We’ve created some winning additions to the playbook!
Precision Nutrient Filling
After spending a LOT of time trying to crack the code and help people win this game, we realised it was impossible to win if you only focused on one nutrient at a time.
Their false sense of gamesmanship has even driven some to ‘cheat’ using synthetic supplements. While it’s easy to pack vitamins and maybe a few smaller minerals into a pill, you need to balance all the micronutrients simultaneously. That’s the key to a Nutritional Optimisation homerun! You need to get all the essential nutrients from the food you eat in the form and ratios that your body understands.
Do you want to know our ‘secret’ discovery–the game changer?
Remember those crystal-clear glasses at the beginning of this article? Imagine them as a row of nutrient buckets lined up, ranging from empty at one end to full at the other.
Now, with your nutrient containers organised, you can focus on filling the containers running low. Then, once the empty containers are topped up, you can re-shuffle the containers to focus on those that need refilling. And so on.
That’s precisely what we’ve done in Nutrient Optimiser to help you manage your micronutrients.
The chart below shows an example of the thirty-four essential micronutrients from a week of food logging.
- The x-axis is the percentage of the Recommended Dietary Intake or the minimum amount of each nutrient required to prevent diseases of deficiency.
- At the bottom, you can see this particular selection of foods provides plenty of nutrients like Vitamin A and K1.
- Meanwhile, we need to focus on the nutrients at the top of the chart, like vitamin D, zinc, calcium, vitamin B1, and magnesium).
Imagine precise, custom-designed watering cans to fill your empty containers.
That is exactly what we’ve done with our suite of NutriBooster Recipes.
The NutriBooster Recipes are designed to enable you to maximise nutrient density (or nutrients per calorie). After you’ve tracked your food in Cronometer for a few days, Nutrient Optimiser gives you a recommended shortlist of foods and meals that will provide you with the cluster of nutrients that your entries show you should focus on. Later, once you’ve dialled in your harder-to-find nutrients, the recommended foods and meals will be re-shuffled to highlight the next batch of foods and meals you can try to attend to the updated shortlist of micronutrients you need to attend to.
As you continue to ‘play,’ your nutrient score climbs–your avatar brims with health and vitality, ready to tackle any challenge.
Levelling Up to The Optimal Nutrient Intakes
As a beginner, you aim first to meet the minimum intake of all the essential nutrients your avatar needs to survive and prevent diseases stemming from deficiency. Without meeting the minimum intake for the various essential nutrients, your avatar will shrivel up and die prematurely.
Once you can check off the Dietary Recommended Intakes (DRI), you are ready to level up and shoot for the Optimal Nutrient Intakes (ONIs).
Rather than only taking in a minimum amount of each nutrient, the ONIs represent a ‘stretch target’ for each nutrient per calorie. This means they are a measure of food quality, regardless of food quantity. The key component of this hack is that you don’t need to eat more food to improve your score. Instead, you must make better food and meal choices to balance your nutritional needs at the micronutrient level without consuming more energy than you need.
The chart below shows an example of a winning nutrient intake score. The x-axis is the Optimal Nutrient Intake per 2000 calories. You get a perfect score if you can fill in everything to the left of the black 100% line!
For more details, see the How Were the Optimal Nutrient Intakes Determined? section of the Micros Masterclass FAQs.
Winning a place on the leaderboard
In addition to knowing that you have improved your diet quality score and nourished your body with all the nutrients it needs without excess energy, you can also win a place at the top of the leaderboard. Of course, it’s not easy to achieve a perfect score, but many people achieve it when they use Nutrient Optimiser in our Micros Masterclass.
The Optimal Nutrient Intakes
The tables below show the Optimal Nutrient Intake targets (per 2000 calories) compared to the Dietary Recommended Intakes and Adequate Intakes (i.e., the minimums to prevent diseases of deficiency). On average, the Optimal Nutrient Intakes are around three and a half times the recommended minimum targets.
Minerals
| nutrient | ONI | DRI or AI | units |
| calcium | 1650 | 1200 | mg |
| copper | 2.0 | 0.9 | mg |
| iron | 25 | 18 | mg |
| magnesium | 840 | 320 | mg |
| manganese | 4.6 | 1.8 | mg |
| phosphorus | 900 | 700 | mg |
| potassium | 6000 | 2600 | mg |
| selenium | 200 | 55 | mcg |
| sodium | 3000 | 1500 | mg |
| zinc | 22 | 8.0 | mg |
Vitamins & Omega 3
| nutrient | ONI | DRI or AI | units |
| thiamine (B1) | 3.0 | 1.1 | mg |
| riboflavin (B2) | 4.0 | 1.1 | mg |
| niacin (B3) | 60 | 14 | mg |
| vitamin B5 | 12 | 5.0 | mg |
| vitamin (B6) | 4.0 | 1.3 | mg |
| vitamin (B12) | 12 | 2.4 | mcg |
| folate | 1000 | 400 | mcg |
| vitamin A | 1500 | 900 | mcg |
| vitamin C | 350 | 75 | mg |
| vitamin D | 1200 | 600 | IU |
| vitamin E | 20 | 15 | mg |
| vitamin K1 | 600 | 90 | mcg |
| omega 3 | 6.0 | 1.1 | g |
Amino Acids
| nutrient | ONI | DRI or AI | units |
| cystine | 2.4 | 0.9 | g |
| histidine | 5.4 | 1.4 | g |
| isoleucine | 8.8 | – | g |
| leucine | 15.2 | – | g |
| lysine | 15.2 | – | g |
| methionine | 4.8 | – | g |
| phenylalanine | 7.9 | 1.6 | g |
| tryptophan | 2.2 | – | g |
| threonine | 8.1 | – | g |
| tyrosine | 6.6 | 1.6 | g |
| valine | 9.8 | 2.3 | g |
What About the Other Nutrients?
You may notice that we haven’t provided Optimal Nutrient Intakes for several nutrients for which we don’t have enough data to establish an optimal intake.
Unfortunately, some nutrients like choline, biotin, chromium, molybdenum and iodine aren’t measured regularly in food. For these nutrients, targeting the default minimum in Cronometer will be fine. You’ll likely get plenty of them from the foods that contain the other nutrients.
We need some omega-6, but there is no specific target. Instead, the guidelines suggest 5 to 10% of calories from omega-6. However, given that more omega-6 generally aligns with eating more and that most people have an excessive dietary omega-6:3 ratio, there is rarely a need to prioritise more omega-6.
How Can I Level Up from the DRIs to ONI Targets?
Because the minimum nutrient intakes are low, many people find it reasonably easy to reach them and see lots of green in Cronometer fairly early in their journey of Nutritional Optimisation.
However, they get pretty discouraged when they input the ONI stretch targets shown in the table above into Cronometer, and all their pretty green bars turn yellow and shrink.
If you want to work your way up to the ONI targets, you can start by changing your settings in Cronometer to the ONIs per 1000 calories (i.e., Level 1). This will highlight the nutrients you need to focus on more effectively. Meanwhile, anything still green and full in Cronometer is good to go – you are already getting plenty of these nutrients.
These Level 1 targets are ideal for people who want to progressively level their nutrient density, particularly if they consume fewer calories in a weight loss phase or older females who require fewer calories than active young men.
Then, once you are getting full green bars for most of the nutrients with the Level 1 targets, you can enter the ONIs per 1500 calories (Level 2) and continue to focus on your priority nutrients. Finally, if you eat around 2000 calories and mainly see green bars, you can level up to the ONI per 2000 calorie targets.
This won’t change the calculation of your Diet Quality Score in Nutrient Optimiser. It just makes the display in Cronometer a little more user-friendly and motivational as you continue on your quest towards Nutritional Optimisation.
Minerals
| nutrient | Level 1 ONI (1000 cals) | Level 2 ONI (1500 cals) | Level 3 ONI (2000 cals) |
| calcium | 1000 | 1325 | 1650 |
| copper | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 |
| iron | 18 | 22 | 25 |
| magnesium | 420 | 630 | 840 |
| manganese | 2.8 | 4.1 | 4.6 |
| phosphorus | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| potassium | 3400 | 4700 | 6000 |
| selenium | 100 | 150 | 200 |
| sodium | 1500 | 2250 | 3000 |
| zinc | 11 | 16.5 | 22 |
Vitamins & Omega 3
| nutrient | Level 1 ONI (1000 cals) | Level 2 ONI (1500 cals) | Level 3 ONI (2000 cals) |
| thiamine (B1) | 1.5 | 2.3 | 3 |
| riboflavin (B2) | 2.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 |
| niacin (B3) | 30 | 45 | 60 |
| vitamin B5 | 6 | 9 | 12 |
| vitamin B6 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| vitamin (B12) | 6 | 9 | 12 |
| folate | 500 | 750 | 1000 |
| vitamin A | 1000 | 1250 | 1500 |
| vitamin C | 175 | 260 | 350 |
| vitamin D | 600 | 900 | 1200 |
| vitamin E | 15 | 17.5 | 20 |
| vitamin K1 | 300 | 450 | 600 |
| omega 3 | 3 | 4.5 | 6 |
Amino acids
| nutrient | Level 1 ONI (1000 cals) | Level 2 ONI (1500 cals) | Level 3 ONI (2000 cals) |
| cystine | 1.2 | 1.8 | 2.4 |
| histidine | 2.7 | 4.1 | 5.4 |
| isoleucine | 4.4 | 6.6 | 8.8 |
| leucine | 7.6 | 11.4 | 15.2 |
| lysine | 7.6 | 11.4 | 15.2 |
| methionine | 2.4 | 3.6 | 4.8 |
| phenylalanine | 4.0 | 5.9 | 7.9 |
| threonine | 4.1 | 6.1 | 8.1 |
| tryptophan | 1.1 | 1.7 | 2.2 |
| tyrosine | 3.3 | 5.0 | 6.6 |
| valine | 4.9 | 7.4 | 9.8 |
Levelling Up Your Nutrient Targets
To change your micronutrient targets in the web version of Cronometer, go to settings -> account profile + targets.
Next, scroll down to the bottom to Nutrient Targets. You can then click on each nutrient and enter the target from your chosen level. Finally, select ‘custom target’ for each nutrient you enter manually. The screenshots below show what this would look like for the Level 3 ONI targets. You can also change your nutrient targets by clicking on each corresponding green and yellow bar in the main diary screen in Cronometer.
Minerals
Vitamins
Fat
Amino Acids
See Beyond the Numbers
Eventually, you begin to see beyond the numbers and understand what nutrient-dense food looks, tastes, and feels like.
Once you leave behind the fake flavours of modern manufactured food, you can listen to what your body needs. You can fill your fridge and cupboard with healthy foods that work for you and then listen to your appetite for guidance on what you need to eat next!
Where Should I Start?
If you got this far and are both intrigued and overwhelmed by the idea of quantifying your nutrient density, we understand.
We have been hard at work over the past three years to simplify this process and to make it as easy as possible to implement.
Free 7-Day Tracking Challenge
If you’re curious and want to see how your nutrition stacks up, we’d love you to take our free 7 Day Nutrient Clarity Challenge. At the end of a week, Nutrient Optimiser will:
- Reveal your nutrient score,
- Identify which foods from your current diet are more and less optimal for you, and
- Identify foods and meals you could add to improve your nutrient score.
NutriBooster Recipes
Once you start to find your feet, you can mix and match your recipes from our suite of NutriBoosters recipe books. These are ideal for people who just want to know what to eat to get the nutrients they need. They are also tailored to a range of goals and preferences.
Micros Masterclass
If you’re ready to level up, we’d love you to try our Micros Masterclass. Over four weeks, we’ll show you how to plug the gaps in your current diet and play the nutrient bucket-filling game to take your nutrition to the next level.
More
- Micros Masterclass
- Join the Micros Masterclass
- Micros Masterclass FAQs
- All About the Micros Masterclass [FAQ Part 1]
- What is Nutrient Density? [FAQ Part 2]
- How to Get the Most Out of Cronometer [FAQ Part 3]
- How to use Nutrient Optimiser [FAQ Part 4]
- Optimising Your Food and Meal Choices [FAQ Part 5]
- Why Are Micronutrients So Important? [FAQ Part 6]
- Micronutrient Deficiencies in Popular Diets [FAQ Part 7]
- Micros Masterclass Articles
- Micros Masterclass Results