NUTRITION

Calories
The 4th Edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans compiled by the government suggests the following:

So, 3 out of 5 calories in our diet are coming from fat or sugar. The government recommends that we increase complex carbohydrates and natural sugars from 28% to 55% and decrease our fat intake from 42% to 30%. Now let’s talk about how you can do this.

You need to stop thinking in terms of counting calories when you choose food. What you need to do is, choose your foods wisely, control portion sizes and decrease fat and sugar intake. If you do this, you will control your calorie intake. Then you won’t have to worry about every single calorie you eat.

The food that we eat provides the energy that our bodies need to survive. The problem occurs, when you take in more calories than your body uses up. It then stores those extra calories as fat.

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is a major determining factor in the amount of calories you need on a daily basis.

The BMR is the amount of energy your body uses for basic functions such as:

There are two factors which also affect your BMR. They are sex and age.

Men have a higher BMR than women due to their larger muscle mass. And since muscle burns more calories at rest than fat does, men tend to have a higher BMR. So women have a smaller muscle mass and have a 5 to 10% lower BMR than men in addition to higher body fat.

Age is another factor. As you age, your BMR rate drops. Once you reach your 20’s and on, your BMR drops an average of 2% per decade. There are some genetic differences in your BMR, too.

Very low calorie supplements, such as Medifast, can slow down your metabolic rate as a starvation mechanism. Your body slows down when calories are restricted. You can’t stop this decrease in BMR, but you can help to offset it with exercise.

Calories come from four sources of food and beverages:

Each gram of protein and carbohydrate	4 calories
Each gram of alcohol	7 calories
Each gram of fat	9 calories

Since fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrates, once you reach your ideal weight, your maintenance diet will emphasize limiting fat intake. The goal is to reduce dietary fat to 30% of calories. Therefore, the lower percentage of fat found in a food, the better the food choice it is.

Portion sizes also have a big influence on your daily caloric intake. If you ate an 8 oz. portion of meat for dinner every night, and you decided to cut it down to a 4 oz. portion of meat, you’d save 300 calories a day. In a year’s time, you could lose 30 lbs from just this one change!

Here’s how you can calculate the percentage of calories from protein, carbohydrate, and fat using the information on food labels. Here’s the caloric value for:

Spaghetti with Meat Sauce
296 Calories per serving
16 grams Protein
40 grams Carbohydrate
8 grams Fat

First, we’ll look at the percentage of Calories from Protein. Since protein has 4 calories per gram, multiply the grams of protein by 4. 16 grams of protein * 4 calories/gram = 64 calories from Protein

Next, divide the number of calories from protein by the total calories per serving, then multiply by 100. This will give you the percentage of calories rom protein. 64 protein calories / 296 total calories =.22 * 100 = 22% of calories from Protein

Now, we’ll look at the percentage of Calories from Carbohydrates. Since carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, multiply the grams of carbohydrates by 4. 40 grams of carbohydrates * 4 calories/gram = 160 calories from Carbohydrates

Then, divide the number of calories from carbohydrates by the total calories per serving, and multiply by 100. This will give you the percentage of calories from carbohydrates. 160 carbohydrate calories / 296 total calories = 54 * 100 = 54% of calories from Carbohydrates

Last, we’ll look at the percentage of Calories from Fat. Since fat has 9 calories per gram, multiply the grams of fat by 9. 8 grams of fat * 9 calories/gram = 72 calories from Fat

Divide the number of calories from fat by the total calories per serving and multiply by 100. This will give you the percentage of calories from fat. 72 fat calories / 296 total calories = 24 * 10 = 24% of calories from Fat

So our spaghetti with meat sauce dinner would consist of 22% of calories from Protein, 54% of calories from Carbohydrates and 24% of calories from Fat. Just what the government recommends.

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Protein
The Atkins and Scarsdale diets were popular in the 60’s and 70’s. They were very high protein and very low calorie carbohydrate diets that consisted of large amounts of meat, eggs and cheese. Any food containing carbohydrates were not to be eaten.

These diets resulted in weight loss, but they were not nutritionally sound. They were high in saturated fat and cholesterol. In addition to not being nutritionally sound – they also had the potential for causing other health problems.

Another problem was that these fad diets didn’t teach you how to eat after you got off the program. So you never learned how to change your eating habits that led to the weight problem in the first place.

We’ve learned a lot since then. We are increasingly becoming aware of what a diet high in fat intake is causing – heart disease and other health related problems. The government has even changed the dietary recommendations in this country from a very high protein, low carbohydrate emphasis to a moderate protein, high complex emphasis.

Here’s an example of how much food you could substitute with the same amount of calories as a pound of prime rib. You could either eat a pound of prime rib (not an abnormally large portion in some restaurants) OR 25 slices of bread, 11 cups of pasta OR 22 small baked potatoes! Could you imagine, eating 22 small baked potatoes at one time?

Protein has many vital functions within the body. Besides being a primary component of all active tissues in the body, protein performs these functions:

Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids. Different proteins are created when thousands of amino acids link together. There are 22 amino acids. These amino acids are classified as either essential or nonessential.

Eight of the amino acids are considered essential, while the remaining 14 are nonessential. The body cannot manufacture the essential amino acids. Therefore, they must be supplied by the diet. They must also be present in the proper proportion and amount in order to be used by the body. Nonessential amino acids can be manufactured from essential amino acids in the diet.

Proteins are classified as either complete or incomplete. Complete proteins contain all 8 essential amino acids in sufficient amounts and proportions to meet the body’s needs.

These incomplete proteins can be combined with each other or with small amounts of animal proteins to provide complete or complementary proteins.

If one protein source contains seven essential amino acids, but is low in the eighth, it can be combined with another protein source containing that missing amino acid. If you’ve eaten peanut butter sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, red beans and rice, bean burritos or cereal with milk, you’ve combined proteins.

Most Americans get more protein in their diet than is necessary. The Recommended Dietary Allowance is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight. Here’s how you can calculate how much protein you need:

A woman who weighs 132 pounds. First you need to convert pounds to kilograms. To do this, you divide pounds by 2.2. 132 lbs / 2.2 = 60 kg. Next, you take the kilograms * .08. 60 kg * 0.8 = 48 grams of protein

Therefore, the Recommended Dietary Allowance for a woman who weighs 132 pounds, is 48 grams of protein per day. To get her daily allowance of protein, she would have in one day 4 oz. of meat, 1 cup of milk, 4 slices of bread, and 2 servings of vegetables.

A man who weighs 176 pounds. First you need to convert pounds to kilograms. To do this, you divide pounds by 2.2. 176 lbs / 2.2 = 80 kg. Next, you take the kilograms * .08. 80 kg * 0.8 = 64 grams of protein

The Recommended Dietary Allowance for a man who weighs 176 pounds, is 64 grams of protein per day. To get his daily allowance of protein, he would have in one day 5 oz. of meat, 2 cups of milk, 5 slices of bread, and 2 servings of vegetables.

Many people get way more protein than they need. Sometimes we take in over 100 grams per day. The problem is that the body doesn’t store excess protein. Therefore, it is converted to energy and may end up being stored as fat.

Traditional protein sources also contain large amounts of fat. 76% of the calories in prime rib come from fat. Therefore, it’s best to choose protein sources low in fat.

Use meatless meals that combine plant protein sources to make complete proteins. Here are the advantages:
• Most are lower in fat and are generally low in saturated fats
• Plants contain no cholesterol
• They are high in complex carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins and minerals
• Plant proteins are usually less expensive than animal proteins.

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Carbohydrates
What are the functions of carbohydrates?

There are two main types of carbohydrates:

Simple Carbohydrates:

Complex Carbohydrates

Simple sugars come in a wide variety of foods. They occur naturally in fruits, vegetables and milk. Sugar and sugar derivatives are added to many foods such as: soft drinks, candies, pies, cookies, cakes, ketchup, peanut butter, and non-dairy creamers.

It is estimated that Americans consume 2 pounds of sugar per week, per person. That’s 151 tsp. of sugar!

You may ask yourself, “why is consuming 2 pounds of sugar a week a problem?” The answer is that sugar contains only calories. It has no other vitamin or mineral nutrient value. When you consume an average of 2 lbs of sugar per week, you are getting over 3,600 empty calories per week. Remember that 3,500 extra calories equals one pound.

So to see how much “sugar” you are eating, you need to start reading food labels. You need to look for more than sugar. Look for sucrose, fructose, dextrose, molasses, honey, syrup, and corn sweeteners. Also, some cereals contain over 50% sugar.

When you hear people talking about increasing your carbohydrate intake, they are talking about increasing the complex carbohydrates we eat -- the “good guys.” These are the types of food that contain complex carbohydrates:

In addition to energy, they provide vitamins, minerals and fiber (if unrefined).

Fiber is the undigestible complex carbohydrate. There are different types of dietary fiber.
Food fibers are:

There are many benefits for including fiber in your diet:

If you increase the fiber in your diet, you may experience the following:

You should add fiber gradually into your diet and increase your fluid intake. You should also get your fiber from food sources rather than pills. Here are some suggestions on what types of fiber you should eat:

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Reducing Dietary Fat
If we wanted to portray nutrition as a script in a Western movie, fats would be the bad guys and complex carbohydrates, proteins and fiber would be the good guys - and they’d win all the shoot-outs. And all the “nutrition” town people would have a lowered risk of developing health problems. But that’s not real life.

In real life, fats win out. Fat makes up 42% of the typical American diet. No wonder that heart disease is the number one cause of death.

To give you an example of how Americans start with something healthy and make it unhealthy, let’s look at a baked potato. A baked potato has 145 calories and a trace of fat. After we make french fries, it has 405 calories and is 47% fat. Another popular food choice is cheese. Cheese is loaded with fat – 70-75% of its calories come from fat.

Since fats have over twice as many calories as proteins or carbohydrates, they are a major contributor to the weight problems we see today.

Let’s take a look at fat, since not all fat is bad.

Fat appears in food in the form of triglycerides, which are three fatty acids attached to glycerol. There are three types of fat: Saturated, Monounsaturated and Polyunsaturated.

You can’t find one food that contains just one type of fat. Food is a combination of all three types.

Let’s look at the three types of Fat:

Next, let's talk about cholesterol. Cholesterol is not a fat. It is classified as a sterol. It has a wax-like substance found in animal products and within the human body. It is an essential part of many substances in the body such as, nerve coverings, glandular tissues and sex hormones. An excess can build up in your blood vessels. This causes blocked arteries, heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure and poor circulation.

The National Cholesterol Education Program has developed the following categories of blood cholesterol levels for individuals over the age of 20:

Desirable	Less than 200 mg / dl
Borderline - High	200-239 mg / dl
High	240 mg / dl and above

Your body gets cholesterol from food. It also manufactures its own from saturated fats. Your body makes enough cholesterol to meet its needs that you don’t need additional cholesterol from your diet. Dietary cholesterol comes only from animal sources. No plants contain cholesterol.

Be careful when foods are labeled no cholesterol. They may contain saturated fats which have a greater effect on raising blood cholesterol levels. Large amounts of cholesterol are found in egg yolks and organ meats. Butter and meats are actually higher in saturated fats than cholesterol. You should plan to keep dietary cholesterol below 300 mg per day.

There are no recommended dietary allowances for fat. Your body needs a small amount to provide the essential fatty acids. Fatty acids cannot be synthesized by the body, they must be provided by food.

It is estimated that a fat intake should be only 1-2% of your total calories. Americans greatly exceed that amount.

As we mentioned already, it is recommend that you decrease your fat intake from 42% of calories to 30%. This would break down into 10% from saturated sources, 10% from polyunsaturated and 10% from monounsaturated fat. In other words, decrease fat intake by choosing lower fat foods and cook with low fat methods.

Substitute poly- or monounsaturated fats for saturated fats whenever possible. Decreasing fat intake helps in weight control. For a typical 2,000 calorie diet of 42% fat, if you made no other change but to decrease fat to 30%, you would cut 240 calories or you would see a 25 pound weight loss in one year. Just from this one little change.

Foods that are all fat are butter, margarine, oils, mayo, salad dressings and bacon.

To reduce dietary fat, increase your fruit and vegetable consumption. Green foods are some of the lowest-calorie, lowest-sugar, and most nutrient-rich foods on the planet. The green color is produced by chlorophyll, or “blood” of the plants.

Chlorophyll’s molecular structure is similar to the hemoglobin of human blood. Hemoglobin is our body’s oxygen transporter. From a chemical standpoint, the components of chlorophyll are almost identical to those of hemoglobin.

A German chemist, Dr. Richard Willstatter, determined in 1913, that the two molecules closely resembled one another. He found that hemoglobin is composed of four elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—organized around a single atom of iron. Hemoglobin’s iron content is the main reason we need a dietary supply of that mineral.

Chlorophyll has the same elements; however, they are organized around a single atom of magnesium. Since green food and our blood have a lot in common, it’s important that we include lots of green vegetables in our diet.

Consider two of the strongest animals in the world are the gorilla and the elephant. What do they eat? Grass and leaves.

Vitamins
What exactly are these “wonder” nutrients we call vitamins? Did you know that scientists didn’t even discover them until 1911? We’ve certainly learned a lot about them since then.

Vitamins are chemical substances needed in small amounts by our body. With the exception of vitamins D and K, our body cannot make its own vitamins and must get them from food sources or supplements.

Vitamins have many functions within the body.

There are 13 known vitamins. They are classified as:

Vitamins are found in varying amounts in different foods. No one food group is expected to meet all the vitamin requirements. Therefore, a variety of foods should be eaten.

Each food group provides contributions. Grains provide thiamin, niacin, and riboflavin. Meats, poultry and fish are good sources of niacin, B6, B12 and thiamin. Milk supplies riboflavin and vitamin D and fruits and vegetables provide vitamins A and C.

Vitamins lose their strength through storage, processing or cooking. Vitamin C, thiamin and riboflavin are the most susceptible ones. Here are some things you can do to minimize vitamin losses:

To know the proper amount of nutrients you need daily, the government has developed guidelines. These guidelines are called the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA).

The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council determines the RDA’s and defines them as the “levels of intake of essential nutrients considered, in the judgment of the Food and Nutrition Board on the basis of available scientific knowledge, to be adequate to meet the known nutritional needs of practically all healthy persons.”

If you look at labels, you’ll notice that they list the U.S. RDA, either by the actual amount or by the percentage of the daily requirement.

Today there is an increasing concern about the problems associated with excesses of vitamins rather than deficiencies as was seen the in the past – some people are taking megadoses of vitamins.

Scientists previously thought the problems only occurred with fat soluble vitamins, since they are stored and build up in the body. But evidence now shows, that it’s possible to develop problems from long-term, excessive intake of some of the water soluble vitamins as well.

Besides being potentially dangerous, large amounts of water soluble vitamins are also a waste of money—since the body doesn’t store these vitamins.

You may ask yourself, “Are vitamin supplements necessary?” If you are eating a well-balanced diet, the answer is no.

You may also wonder if, taking a daily multiple vitamin supplement is harmful? It probably won’t hurt you as long as it contains no more than 100% of the RDA’s.

Click Here for a food supplement that will provide your daily vitamins and minerals

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Minerals
Minerals are chemical elements that are vital to our everyday existence. If it wasn’t for minerals, our human body would resemble a lump of jelly because we’d have no bones to give us support. I’d say, minerals are pretty important!

The minerals in our body are classified as either macro or micro.

The macrominerals are those that the body needs in relatively large amounts:

Of the vitamins noted above, calcium is the most abundant in the body. It makes up 2% of our body’s weight and half the total of all the other minerals combined.

The microminerals are also known as the trace elements. They are needed in very small amounts by our body. They make up only .01% of the body’s weight. They are:

Minerals perform a variety of functions in our body. Some work alone, and some work together with other minerals or nutrients. Here are some of their functions:

Just as vitamins do not provide energy, minerals do not as well. Instead, some minerals perform essential functions in producing energy from proteins, carbohydrates and fats.

Plants get minerals from the soil they grow in. Animals get them from the plant foods they eat. So if you are eating a variety of foods, you’ll get the minerals your body needs. The exception is processed foods.

During the processing and refining, many of the minerals present in the raw products are lost. Examples are: sugar, cornstarch and products made from refined white flour. That’s why you should eat more whole grain products such as, whole wheat bread.

Another exception to the abundance of minerals in foods is iron and calcium.

The most abundant sources of calcium are dairy products. It is also present in other foods, just in smaller amounts. The US RDA recommends 800 mg per day. Iron is present in both animal and plant sources.

Like vitamins, minerals also present problems when they are taken in excess. Excessive intake of any one mineral has the potential for upsetting your body’s balance of minerals and causing a shortage of another mineral.

For example, an excessive intake of phosphorus can lead to a deficiency of calcium, even if you’re getting an adequate calcium intake. An excess of iron can cause serious problems such as liver, pancreas or kidney damage. Some of the trace minerals are also poisonous if taken in large quantities.

Again, the question comes up, is a mineral supplement necessary. Iron and calcium are two minerals that a supplement may be needed. A well-balanced diet should provide sufficient amounts of other minerals, but taking a supplement containing no more than 100% of the RDA (although it may not be necessary) is probably not harmful.

Most minerals are stable in foods. But some are subject to losses when cooked. To get the best mineral intake from food, follow the guidelines for retaining optimal vitamin nutrition:
? Whenever possible, choose whole grain products over refined ones
? Eat a source of vitamin C with a source of iron to increase absorption
? Cook in iron pots to increase iron intake

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Sodium
Sodium is a mineral – with a unique distinction. Most Americans eat 20 to 25 times more sodium than is actually required by the body.

The problem is that high sodium intakes are associated with increased risks for developing high blood pressure or hypertension. High blood pressure is linked to serious health problems such as stroke, kidney disease and heart disease.

It’s hard to know if you’re susceptible to developing high blood pressure later in life. Therefore, the government suggests that all Americans should “avoid too much sodium” and the Food and Nutrition Board sets a “safe and adequate” intake at 1100-3300 mg per day. Our body only needs 250 mg per day.

Sodium is in a wide variety of foods. It occurs naturally in most foods, with the exception of fruits—which are mostly sodium free.

The word salt and sodium cannot be used interchangeably. Salt consists of 40% sodium and 60% chloride. You can taste salt in everyday foods such as potato chips. But there are foods that don’t taste salty, yet have more sodium than salty-tasting foods. An example is a half cup of instant chocolate pudding, it has 404 mg of sodium and has more sodium than two 1-oz bags of potato chips that have 382 mg.

How can you cut down on your sodium intake?