Diet and Nutrition
Q- what is a well balanced diet?
A- Following the food pyramid is a good place to start and maybe it’s a good place to end for some people. If you take all the food somebody eats at the end of the week and then add them all up and how much variety there was, you will find that there really wasn’t that much variety.
People generally have a dozen foods they like to eat and they will end up eating the same foods day after day for most of their life and that are where you run into problems. You get stuck in a rut and fail to incorporate a vast variety into your diet and fail to get the nutritional balance that you should be getting.
If you know nothing about food but incorporate a lot of variety into your diet the chances of your being malnourished because you don’t get the right nutrients goes down hill.
I like fresh fruits and vegetables especially in the summer time. My wife does the grocery shopping and she and I like fresh fruit and vegetables. We will just take a big salad bowl and fill it like the diet out there called the Rainbow diet.
It’s based on all the different colors of fruits and vegetables. So I will take purple grapes and onions and garlic and sprinkle some lettuce and if we have fresh strawberries I will add those cantaloupe and really your imagination is your only limitation.
You know, just basically add all your favorite fruits and vegetables and throw in a couple of tablespoons of your favorite dressing and season it to taste. Mix it all up and you have an incorporation of all of that variety. You get all of the vitamins and the nutrients and the minerals that you need in just one meal instead of just ingesting one kind of food.
My point is the more variety you can get in your diet the greater the possibility that if you are lacking in something that you are going to get it. I am an advocate of getting variety in your diet. It all comes down to looking at your budget and having some knowledge of getting what you need and looking at the food labels.
With just a little bit of knowledge of how to read food labels and what you need you can make the right choices with the money that you have to work with.
Even the restaurants and the fast food chains are starting to offer more nutritious choices, likes salads. Subway is one that has really jumped on the bandwagon. You know the one with Jared standing there saying this deep fat fried sandwich contains 45 plus grams of fat I wonder how they got all that fat in there to begin with and compare it to the subway sandwich.
I saw an interview where they were talking with the producer of Sesame Street and they were talking about the cookie monster and how it was presented in a way to get kids to eat more junk food and more cookies. Now they have repositioned that whole program to where they are starting to teach kids more about nutrition.
I am hoping that one of the things that are happening is that there is awareness about nutrition and this obesity epidemic. Some people are just succumbing to obesity and the things that come with it like cancer and heart disease and diabetes. It’s good to see some positive changes taking place.
Q- Why is that we sometimes crave certain foods? Can it be that your body is sending you a message?
A- You know that in some developing cultures there is a craving that some people have and I believe it is called Pica. It is where a person will have a craving to eat a particular food item and it doesn’t always have to be a food item, it can be dirt or something that isn’t a food at all. The theory is that people will have a craving for certain things that will provide a nutrient that is lacking.
In our culture I don’t think it is metabolic for food cravings. You know if you are used to consuming sugary sweets and that is all you eat, your metabolism adapts and guides you to the foods you are used to consuming.
An example of that would be someone who has gone on a vegetarian diet and eliminate meat from their diet temporarily. Then they start to reintroduce meat and their stomach is upset. Their stomach is not used to digesting that kind of food.
They have adapted to digesting just non-meat items. There are food digestive adaptations to the kinds of food that you eat. One would have to believe that those are the kinds of foods that you get used to.
Q- Do we become hungry because our stomach is empty or is it because of something else?
A- That is a tricky question. There are people who have studied this and can boil it right down to all kinds of enzymes and mechanisms that kick into play that stimulate appetite or depress appetite. Individual metabolism is so significant individually that I am sure that you can feel that on a general basis.
You know one thing that I can say is when I go exercise and I get back and sit down I need to replenish my water intake. The next thing that I find is that if I find a combination of fruits to eat it will suppress my hunger because fruits are primarily water and sugar and carbohydrates.
But the digestive process is pretty rapid when it comes to breaking down sugars into glucose and the glucose is stored in your body. So digestion of fruits in particular is pretty rapid. I can consume a lot of fresh fruits and it doesn’t satisfy my hunger.
I will still have hunger pains because the digestion is completed so rapidly as opposed to protein, which takes longer. It almost seems like exercise can suppress appetite but I think you have to balance that whole idea with how much exercise you are doing and how many calories your body needs to replace and what kinds of food you are going to consume when you are done.
It is complex and is another whole area to think about why people are gaining weight, whether it is emotional or whether it is the amount of exercise they have done.
You know that everybody that is out there studying this whole thing and trying to help people lose weight, each one of these communities have their own theories and their own recommendations.
They all study it in a different way - some try to understand the psychology and some try to understand the nutritional aspects of it. You know, if it was well understood we probably wouldn’t be having the problems we are having today.
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