more Thursday:
I had a Nutrition tutorial yesterday, and we filled out a anonymous quiz about our nutrition knowledge then looked at how people answered.
Questions included: Alcohol has negligible calories/kilojoules, true or false?
At least a quarter of the group thought that was true!
Meat, fish and eggs are a good source of fibre, true or false?
Again, a lot of people said true!
I was astonished.
Yes, I've read a lot about nutrition and I'm twice the age of most of the others so I probably know more. But I thought this was basic stuff everyone knew. Apparently not.
You just can't make assumptions about what other people do or don't know. I have huge gaps in my own knowledge - anything to do with sport, for example. Maybe other people would be flabbergasted about how little I know about car maintenance, considering I drive one every day.
This is going to be interesting.
Showing posts with label nutrition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nutrition. Show all posts
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Nutrition fun facts
Sunday:
This information is from my "Introduction to Nutrition" textbook (Understanding Nutrition, Whitney et al, 2011) which I assume is based on the latest scientific research.
1) Lactose intolerance varies widely across ethnic groups. For instance 75% of African Americans are lactose intolerant, whereas less than 10% of Northern Europeans are. As I am of English and Russian stock, and therefore one of the lucky 30% of the world who produce plenty of lactase enzymes, I shall continue to enjoy my cheese and milk without worrying that it is doing nasty things to my insides. It isn't.
2) I'm up to Chapter 4 and this won't be discussed fully until Chapter 7 so I don't have all the science behind it, but carbohydrates are important to the human body and very low carb diets have negative health consequences. My calorie counting app suggests I have around 200g of carbohydrate a day, the textbook says 50 to 100g is needed. So it's not suggesting you need to have lots of pasta every day, but it advises you to avoid the kind of very low carb diet that doesn't even let you have fruit or starchy vegetables.
3) Scientists are still learning about sugars in the body (and everything else) and one worrying new bit of information is "Cancer cells coated with sugar molecules, for example, are able to sneak by the cells of the immune system."
So, those are a few interesting things I've learned this week.
This information is from my "Introduction to Nutrition" textbook (Understanding Nutrition, Whitney et al, 2011) which I assume is based on the latest scientific research.
1) Lactose intolerance varies widely across ethnic groups. For instance 75% of African Americans are lactose intolerant, whereas less than 10% of Northern Europeans are. As I am of English and Russian stock, and therefore one of the lucky 30% of the world who produce plenty of lactase enzymes, I shall continue to enjoy my cheese and milk without worrying that it is doing nasty things to my insides. It isn't.
2) I'm up to Chapter 4 and this won't be discussed fully until Chapter 7 so I don't have all the science behind it, but carbohydrates are important to the human body and very low carb diets have negative health consequences. My calorie counting app suggests I have around 200g of carbohydrate a day, the textbook says 50 to 100g is needed. So it's not suggesting you need to have lots of pasta every day, but it advises you to avoid the kind of very low carb diet that doesn't even let you have fruit or starchy vegetables.
3) Scientists are still learning about sugars in the body (and everything else) and one worrying new bit of information is "Cancer cells coated with sugar molecules, for example, are able to sneak by the cells of the immune system."
So, those are a few interesting things I've learned this week.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Understanding Nutrition
Friday:
Uni doesn't start for a couple of weeks but I've read Chapter One of my Introduction to Nutrition textbook and since this is mainly a health/weight-loss I though you might be interested in what I am learning.
Understanding Nutrition, Whitney et al, Cengage Learning, 2011
Chapter One was an introduction and overview and didn't really contain new information for me, but it was reassuring to have some familiar concepts reinforced (as opposed to my Biology textbook which was nearly all new stuff).
It went through some reasons why people make food choices; including taste, habit and social/cultural conventions among others. It went on to list the macro and micro nutrients (proteins, fats, vitamins etc) and talked about kilojoules/calories. In Australia we officially use kilojoules, but a lot of people including myself think in terms of calories so I will need to get used to kilojoules (1 kilojoule = 4.2 calories).
Here is a fun fact, what most people call calories are actually kilocalories. The name has been shortened which is very inaccurate - imagine if we started calling kilometres "metres" because it is a shorter word! Not the same thing at all.
Then there was a brief discussion of the role of food in the body, ie not just to provide energy but also the raw materials for building and repairing the body and dozens of other things. It touched briefly on the importance of water, which will be discussed more fully later in the book. My biology text also emphasised the role of water in just about every process in the human body. It has vital differences to every other liquid and is essential on the cellular level. It's not just there to flush out salt and keep blood flowing! Lots of the molecules in your cells (or was it all of them?) can't even attach to each other without water. We'd just fall apart.
The authors talked about what constitutes valid, reliable research and how we know whether we can trust new information, ie peer reviewed journal articles vs claims on a website trying to sell you a weight loss protein bar.
Finally they discuss how recommended dietary intakes are established, including how more of an essential vitamin does not mean better, and talk about how to do a nutrition assessment of an individual or a population.
The book includes access to a website with quizzes and stuff but, frustratingly, I haven't been able to log in yet. I'm really impressed by the book though, it is very clear and interesting so far. It seems to get across a lot of information without being overwhelming.
Uni doesn't start for a couple of weeks but I've read Chapter One of my Introduction to Nutrition textbook and since this is mainly a health/weight-loss I though you might be interested in what I am learning.
Chapter One was an introduction and overview and didn't really contain new information for me, but it was reassuring to have some familiar concepts reinforced (as opposed to my Biology textbook which was nearly all new stuff).
It went through some reasons why people make food choices; including taste, habit and social/cultural conventions among others. It went on to list the macro and micro nutrients (proteins, fats, vitamins etc) and talked about kilojoules/calories. In Australia we officially use kilojoules, but a lot of people including myself think in terms of calories so I will need to get used to kilojoules (1 kilojoule = 4.2 calories).
Here is a fun fact, what most people call calories are actually kilocalories. The name has been shortened which is very inaccurate - imagine if we started calling kilometres "metres" because it is a shorter word! Not the same thing at all.
Then there was a brief discussion of the role of food in the body, ie not just to provide energy but also the raw materials for building and repairing the body and dozens of other things. It touched briefly on the importance of water, which will be discussed more fully later in the book. My biology text also emphasised the role of water in just about every process in the human body. It has vital differences to every other liquid and is essential on the cellular level. It's not just there to flush out salt and keep blood flowing! Lots of the molecules in your cells (or was it all of them?) can't even attach to each other without water. We'd just fall apart.
The authors talked about what constitutes valid, reliable research and how we know whether we can trust new information, ie peer reviewed journal articles vs claims on a website trying to sell you a weight loss protein bar.
Finally they discuss how recommended dietary intakes are established, including how more of an essential vitamin does not mean better, and talk about how to do a nutrition assessment of an individual or a population.
The book includes access to a website with quizzes and stuff but, frustratingly, I haven't been able to log in yet. I'm really impressed by the book though, it is very clear and interesting so far. It seems to get across a lot of information without being overwhelming.
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