Classroom Tools Series:
Health Resources 1 – All about Nutrition
Are you fond of snacking on ‘instant’ food? Are packs of instant pancit canton or canned goods staples in your house? Do you make it a habit to check the nutritional content labels of the foods you buy from the grocery or your local stores? With the changing times, our food choices have evolved with this fast-paced world and more often than not, we prefer ready-made or processed foods. Unfortunately, these items have lesser – or even non-existent – nutritional values.
Our lifestyles today do not only suggest that we must be aware of our health. It is rather imperative that we should be conscious about its conditions, the different signals our body is sending, and especially watch out for the food we eat with all the emerging diseases today – cancer, diabetes, heart problems, stroke – that could have been prevented if proper diet were just observed.
Good Nutrition and a Healthy Lifestyle
We’re not saying that good nutrition is synonymous to a longer and healthier life. Instead, it “should be part of an overall healthy lifestyle, which also includes regular exercise, not smoking or drinking alcohol excessively, stress management and limiting exposure to environmental hazards.” We’re also not ruling out the influence of genes in terms of risk for certain health problems; rather, we should be aware of the effects of whatever we intake in possibly reducing or compounding those risks.1
Those who suffer from obesity usually eat more than their caloric requirement and they bear the pain of backaches and arthritis due to increased blood pressure, blood sugar, and of course, weight. With eating too much fats, heart attacks and strokes are the greatest enemies due to increased cholesterol in blood. High blood pressure along with these two medical complications may also be experienced by those who eat too much salt either directly or through preservatives.2
Meanwhile, osteoporosis or the gradual thinning of bones may be slowed by consuming enough calcium, maintaining adequate Vitamin D levels and participating in weight-bearing exercise. If you have a history of diabetes in your family, there’s a thin chance that the disease will strike if you keep your weight within a healthy range through diet and exercise.3
Case in point is the multitalented artist Gary Valenciano. He is diabetic but looking at him while performing on stage with those lively moves, one would wonder how the performer could actually be afflicted with the traitorous disease. Because of a very strict diet and discipline, Mr. Pure Energy could most probably dance through another 50 years of his life.
Keys to good nutrition and the truth about calories
In Aetna Intelihealth’s site, they have enumerated three keys to good nutrition:4
- Balance
The right balance of the main components of nutrition is needed by the body to stay healthy. The three main components of nutrition are carbohydrates, fats, and protein.
- Variety
“No single food or food group has it all.” Because of this, there should be variety in the foods we eat to be able to acquire the different nutrients that our body needs. Also, we need vitamins, minerals and other substances from several food sources which will be discussed in the second part of the article (Vitamins and Minerals).
- Moderation
“Moderation means eating neither too much nor too little of any food or nutrient.” In the ThinkQuest Library, they have stated the paradoxical relationship between nutrition and its association with health – that “both over and under nutrition can lead to ill health.”5
If you are already counting the calories of what you eat and still think that weight loss is a matter of burning the food you take in, you may be a victim of the “old school of nutrition.” For those who think that calories don’t matter but macronutrients do, you belong to the otherwise known as the new school of thought.
Unfortunately, both schools of thought fail to take into account important factors such as the unique human physiologies, varying metabolisms, and its different effects on one’s health. To clarify the discrepancies between the two and to avoid more confusion, health expert Will Brink came up with The Unified Theory Of Nutrition where he explained how the two schools of thought can actually be brought together. He also discussed the difference between weight loss as against fat loss and ultimately how to come up with an optimal diet.
Recommended Link – National Nutrition Council (NCC)
NCC, now under the Department of Agriculture, maintains an informative website which features the Nutrition Month’s Talking Points (a comprehensive paper tackling the nutrition of school-age children – downloadable from the site), Nutrition Facts, News Flash/Events, Food for School Program (FSP) plus the Philippine Nutrition Country Profile (NCP) which reports the current nutritional status of the populace, statistics and maps on micronutrient deficiencies, and poverty incidence.
Sources:
1, 3, 4 The Importance Of Nutrition,
http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/325/7094.html
2, 5 The Importance Of Nutrition,
http://library.thinkquest.org/10120/cyber/extended/nutrition.html
6 Hippocrates, http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Hippocra
