 When you think about your food, do you think of it as the food as a whole or as a single nutrient? We have long taken a reductionist approach to our food where we break complex foods down to single nutrients and then attribute those nutrients to health. But when we eat, we eat whole foods. We do not just eat single isolated nutrients and we need to start viewing our food and our diet that way. So I introduced the concept of the food matrix. The food matrix is a concept that considers the nutrient and the non-nutrient components of a food, how those interact with one another to ultimately impact your health. Because nutrients do vary in bioaccessibility, meaning how much can our body actually use them based on other nutrients present in the food and then other factors like cooking method, pH, temperature, just to name a few. And one of the best places to see this at play is in dairy foods with the dairy matrix. Dairy foods have three matrices, liquid, semi-solid, and solid. And all of these are different and how they impact your health.