Nutrition Practice Questions With Answers
Twelve nutrition practice questions with answers and explanations from the free Encodr course, across macronutrients, vitamins, energy balance and food safety.
These twelve questions come from Encodr's free Nutrition course, which has 16 units and more than a thousand study cards. The set is spread across eleven of them, from basic concepts through energy balance, vitamins and minerals to food safety and disease, so you can see which kinds of material you already have down and which you do not.
Each question is shown the way the course asks it: multiple choice, short answer, true or false and fill in the blank. The answers are printed inline, so the one rule is to commit to your own answer before you read ours. Writing or saying an answer first, even a wrong one, is what makes practice work; the testing effect is the research behind it, and quizzing yourself beats rereading the same pages.
Keep a tally. Anything you miss is a card to review tomorrow rather than a topic to reread tonight.
1. Unit 1: Basic Concepts
What does ABCD stand for in nutritional assessment?
Answer: Anthropometric, Biochemical, Clinical and Dietary.
Why: Anthropometry is body measurements (height, weight, skinfold thickness, waist-hip ratio), biochemical is lab tests of blood, urine or tissue, clinical is physical signs of deficiency, and dietary methods cover what a person eats.
2. Unit 3: Water and Electrolytes
What is osmosis?
Answer: The movement of water across a selectively permeable membrane toward the side with the higher solute concentration.
Why: The chapter note puts it as water moving toward the side with more dissolved particles. That is why a cell shrinks in a hypertonic solution and swells in a hypotonic one.
3. Unit 4: Carbohydrates
In the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, added sugars should stay below _____ of daily calories for people age 2 and older.
Answer: 10 percent
Why: This is an edition question. The 2020-2025 guidelines say under 10% of calories for age 2 and up, while the 2025-2030 guidelines recommend no amount and at most 10 g in one meal, so check which edition your course uses.
4. Unit 5: Lipids
In the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines, saturated fat should not exceed what share of daily calories?
- A. 5 percent
- B. 10 percent
- C. 20 percent
- D. 35 percent
Answer: B. 10 percent
Why: The 2025-2030 edition keeps the limit at 10 percent of daily calories, as the 2020-2025 edition did.
5. Unit 6: Protein
Which of these is an essential amino acid?
- A. Alanine
- B. Leucine
- C. Glycine
- D. Serine
Answer: B. Leucine
Why: The nine essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine.
6. Unit 7: Alcohol
True or false: Drinking coffee or taking a cold shower speeds up the liver's metabolism of alcohol.
Answer: False
Why: Only time lowers BAC; coffee or cold showers do not speed alcohol metabolism, they only make a person feel more awake.
7. Unit 8: Energy Balance and Weight
True or false: A BMI of 25.0 is classified as healthy weight under the CDC adult categories.
Answer: False
Why: Healthy weight is 18.5 to under 25, so 25.0 is already in the overweight category.
8. Unit 8: Energy Balance and Weight
Which set of inputs does the Mifflin-St Jeor equation use to predict resting energy expenditure?
- A. Waist size, hip size, age and sex
- B. Body fat percent, diet and sleep
- C. Blood pressure, weight and BMI
- D. Weight, height, age and sex
Answer: D. Weight, height, age and sex
Why: Mifflin-St Jeor uses weight in kg, height in cm, age in years and sex to estimate resting energy.
9. Unit 9: Vitamins
Which antioxidant recycles spent vitamin E?
- A. Vitamin C
- B. Vitamin K
- C. Riboflavin
- D. Vitamin D
Answer: A. Vitamin C
Why: Vitamin C donates electrons to regenerate vitamin E after it neutralizes a radical.
10. Unit 10: Major Minerals
Which food has a lot of calcium but is poorly absorbed because of its oxalate?
- A. Kale
- B. Broccoli
- C. Bok choy
- D. Spinach
Answer: D. Spinach
Why: Oxalate in spinach binds calcium, so little is absorbed.
11. Unit 15: Food Safety
The USDA danger zone for bacterial growth runs from 40 F to _____ (4.4 C to 60 C).
Answer: 140 F
Why: The USDA danger zone is 40-140 F (4.4-60 C), and bacteria can double in as little as 20 minutes inside it.
12. Unit 16: Nutrition and Disease
What causes type 1 diabetes?
- A. Insulin resistance that builds up in muscle, liver and fat cells
- B. Years of eating too much added sugar and refined starch
- C. Immune destruction of the pancreatic insulin-secreting cells
- D. A long-term shortage of fiber and whole grains in the diet
Answer: C. Immune destruction of the pancreatic insulin-secreting cells
Why: In type 1 diabetes the immune system destroys the insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas, so the body needs insulin.
How to read your score
- Misses in units 4-6 and 9-10 usually mean memorization gaps. These units are fact-dense, and a comparison table (fat-soluble versus water-soluble vitamins, for example) fixes more than rereading does. Start with fat-soluble vs water-soluble vitamins.
- Misses on the edition-sensitive questions, such as added sugars and saturated fat, mean you need to know which edition of the Dietary Guidelines your instructor is using. The course labels every guideline card with its edition.
- Misses on the calculation questions mean you should work the arithmetic from a blank page. The BMR and TDEE calculator and the macronutrient calculator show every step so you can find where your setup went wrong.
Keep going
The full Nutrition deck has every card from these twelve questions and the rest of the course, scheduled with spaced repetition so the cards you miss come back sooner. For the shape of the course, read what's in a nutrition course, and for a week-by-week approach, read how to study for a nutrition class. If your exam is coming up, a study schedule built backward from the date keeps the review from bunching up at the end.
Encodr turns this into a habit: study anything in a feed, and it schedules the rest.
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