Archive for the ‘Diet’ Category:
Keeping Vitamin Values Intact
Keeping Vitamin Values Intact
Many vitamins are readily destroyed or lost when foods are preserved, stored, and cooked. With the current emphasis on highly refined and precooked convenience foods and the great distances fresh foods must travel before they reach the consumer’s table, the modern American diet may shortchange some people.
Much of the following advice on how to get the most vitamins for your food dollar is derived from research cited in Nutritional Evaluation of Food Processing.
- Eat whole grain rather than refined breads and cereals and brown rice instead of white. Enriched breads, pasta, cereals, and rice are second best. Parboiled or converted rice has more vitamins than polished rice.
- Use fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables instead of canned ones. During canning, the amount of many vitamins is reduced by half or more, and further losses occur during storage of the canned goods. Freezing, followed by storage and cooking, also reduces the vitamin content, but much less than does canning. Boil-in-the-bag frozen foods are preferred for their vitamin content. Don’t thaw frozen vegetables before cooking.
Micronutrients: Essential in Tiny Amounts
Micronutrients: Essential in Tiny Amounts
Throughout most of evolution, food was our only source of vitamins and minerals. Today, however, the “one-a-day” multivitamin-mineral tablet is a kind of nutritional insurance policy for millions of Americans, whether they need it or not. In recent years it has been eclipsed by megadose formulations of individual micro nutrients supposedly capable of performing health miracles far beyond warding off the well-known deficiency diseases.
The Lift Sustaining Vitamins
Even as millions down a veritable alphabet soup’s worth of vitamin supplements each day, confusion and controversy surround these nutrients. There’s only one fact about which there is no argument: Vitamins are essential to good health. But which ones, for whom, and how much?
The Health Effects of Fiber
The Health Effects of Fiber
Fiber is hardly the cure-all some have suggested. But neither does fiber belong at the bottom of the nutritional totem pole, where it resided for more than a century as a nonessential dietary ingredient. There is good evidence, for example, that certain dietary fibers can lower blood cholesterol levels and improve the processing of blood sugar by diabetics.
Although the evidence is conflicting, high-fiber diets have been helpful to many patients with chronic intestinal disorders, such as constipation, spastic colon, diverticular disease, and even Crohn’s disease (regional enteritis or ileitis). And there is some evidence that fiber can help to lower blood pressure and ward off gallstones.
What Is Fiber?
What Is Fiber?
Dietary fibers come only from plants. They are the chemical substances in the cell walls that give plants structure and stability. Fibers in elude cellulose, polysaccharides, hemicelluloses, pectins, gums, mucilages, and lignin.
Different kinds of plants contain different fibers. Even within a species, the fiber content may vary according to growing conditions and maturity at harvest. Bran is almost entirely cellulose; apples, grapes, and some other fruits are high in pectin.
Fibers are not digested by human digestive enzymes. However, many are partially or completely digested by bacteria that reside in the gut, resulting in the production of gases.
Dietary Fiber: A Feast for Your Body
Dietary Fiber: A Feast for Your Body
Today, more than sixty years later, similar high-fiber diets are being advocated as capable of preventing or curing everything from constipation, hemorrhoids, and colon cancer, to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and schizophrenia. Although many researchers have been studying fiber for years, the current fad was triggered in 1970 by Dr. Denis Burkitt, a British physician.
He reported that countries where large amounts of fiber are regularly consumed had low rates of colon-rectal cancer, benign diseases of the colon (such as diverticulosis), appendicitis, varicose veins, gallstones, and heart disease. Popular books and articles soon followed, vastly exaggerating the health claims for dietary fiber.
What Harm Does Sugar Cause?
What Harm Does Sugar Cause?
As for sugar’s reputed adverse health effects, the following can be said on the basis of available evidence:
Obesity. Sugar supplies 4 calories per gram (113 per ounce) – the same as protein and less than half that of fat, which provides 9 calories per gram. Excess calorie intake, not sugar, causes obesity. But since calories can be highly concentrated in sugar-sweetened foods, you may eat many more calories than you need of such foods before you feel full or even realize how much you have consumed. Compare the satiety value of, say, three bananas with that of a two-ounce candy bar; both have about the same carbohydrate content. Fructose, the primary sugar in fruits, is 50 percent sweeter than sucrose, and so fewer fructose calories are needed to obtain the same degree of sweetness. However, the use of fructose in nutritionally deficient sweet foods does little to improve their health value.
Sugar : Too Much of a Bad Thing
Sugar : Too Much of a Bad Thing
Sugar proponents call it quick energy, opponents say it’s empty calories. To the average American, who consumes a third of a pound of it each day, sugar is mostly an irresistibly good taste. Human societies have long equated sweetness with goodness – sweet mystery of life, sweet smell of success, sweetheart – and that enhances the attraction.
People seem to have an innate “sweet tooth.” If saccharin is injected into the womb, the fetus will increase its swallowing of the sweetened amniotic fluid. Newborn rats given a choice will consume sugar water in preference to a nutritious diet, even to the point of malnutrition and death.
A Simple Guide to Complex Carbohydrates
A Simple Guide to Complex Carbohydrates
Here is a dietary guide to the good carbohydrates.
Potatoes. As they come from the ground, potatoes are relatively low in calories (150 for a large baking potato) and high in nutrients, including some protein. An adult could derive nearly all needed nutrients from potatoes. Baked, steamed, or boiled, they are an excellent food. But a single pat of butter or margarine increases the calorie content of a medium-sized potato by a third.
Deep-frying destroys some vitamins and adds astronomically to calories. Of the calories in french fries, 70 percent are from fat. Potato chips are also mostly fat (and high in salt) – 150 calories per ounce, 90 of them from fat. About nine chips add up to 100 calories.
The Body’s Main Fuel
The Body’s Main Fuel
Carbohydrates, both simple and complex, are the body’s main source of energy. They are readily digested and converted into the blood sugar glucose, which fuels the brain and muscles. Without carbohydrates, the body must rely on fats and protein for energy. Fats bum inefficiently in the absence of carbohydrates and leave the kidneys with the burden of excreting large amounts of toxic metabolic chemicals called ketone bodies. These can build up in the blood and cause nausea, fatigue, and apathy, a common effect among those who adhere to the faddish lowcarbohydrate diets.
When protein is used for energy, the body is deprived of this crucial nutrient for building and replacing tissues, and the kidneys have to get rid of the unused nitrogen that’s left over. That’s why on high-protein diets you must drink lots of water to help flush out your kidneys.
Starches: Not Fattening and Good for You
Starches: Not Fattening and Good for You
There’s one simple way to save calories and money in your daily food budget: Eat the potatoes. Also the rice, pasta, corn, beans, and bread. Strange advice, coming in a book on healthful living? Aren’t these the starchy foods, high in calories and low in nutrients, that our forefathers were forced to live on but that we, in our late-twentieth-century affluence and abundance, can afford to pass up or merely sample now and again?
The answer is yes – and no. Yes, these are starchy foods, laden with so-called complex carbohydrates (as opposed to sugars, which are simple carbohydrates). No, they are not high in calories. Ounce for ounce, they have no more calories than pure protein, and they have fewer than half the calories in fat.