You see it everyday, news and information that bring to the front our problem with our weight. It is a national problem. It's not just your older sedentary population; it's not just your overworked middle-age population; and it's not just your nerdy teenage population. It is a national epidemic.
The first question I always have, is how did we get here? How did we go from one of the most physically fit nations, to just wallowing in our weight?
Over the last thirty years, food nutritionists and the food industry as a whole have embraced the idea of lowering our fat intake. This was a direct result of the information published by the government that encouraged less egg consumption because of the cholesterol found in eggs. After that particular piece of information, doctors began to discover that when we consume fat, we have higher incidences of cholesterol problems. The logical conclusion: fat must be bad for you. And so, an entire generation as grown up with fat-free foods. A whole generation grew up believing that fat was what made us fat, clogged our arteries, and generally caused ill-health.
So what did we do? We turned to carbs to make up for the loss in taste of food that had the fat removed; for you see, fat is what gives many of our foods their delicious taste. When you remove the fat, the taste must be artificially injected into the food. The end result is a food that is higher in carbohydrate content, but lower in fat. Hence, all the wonderful labels displaying the claim of "fat free" but neglect to mention the higher level of carbohydrates. Lowered fat should have created a population of slim, trim, healthy people. Right?
We could not have been further from the truth. As it turns out, fat is a necessary part of our metabolic processes. We need the fat in order to properly utilize many of the vitamins and nutrients we consume. When did we make this discovery? Probably some thirty years too late for some people.
Now, we have an entire generation of young people, who have because of their high carbohydrate food choices, become a nation of obese adults. Never before has a nation recorded the kind of obesity problems this nation is facing now. Never before have we ever had so much, to have so little. These young people are experiencing low self-esteem, weight related health problems, and whole host of emotional problems, thanks to obesity issue. How can we try to help them correct this problem?
According to the guides published by the USDA, calorie needs vary from one age group to another, one gender to another. So how do you determine what your individual needs are? You can setup a journal for recording your daily caloric intake for about a month. Make a note of your weight each day. If you don't gain any weight during the course of that month, you're eating your recommended calorie level in order to maintain your weight. Now, take that calorie information, use the food pyramid and comprise a combination of foods that will help you achieve this recommended daily intake, and still be enough to be filling and please the palette. You now have an individualized healthy eating plan. This is the safe sure way to reach weight loss goals. It didn't become a problem overnight, and it won't go away overnight.
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Right now, the greatest results in raising our metabolism come from exercise and building our muscle mass, while reducing our body fat. Adding more muscle to the body, in turn causes us to burn more calories, and this helps to elevate our metabolic rate.
What determines our metabolic rate, as far as our genetics? Generally, we tend to inherit the same tendencies for metabolic rates, body frames, and other related body functions from our parents.
All of this metabolic process is related to our calorie intake, our vitamin and nutrition needs, our thyroid and endocrine production, and how well all of these processes come together
The body's metabolism is a unique process for each individual person. No two people metabolize food at the same rate therefore no two people have the metabolism. We all use our calories at different rates, with different results. Our metabolism, like our fingerprints is unique to each of us. But the need to understand and accommodate this metabolism is an issue that we all face. I said all of that, to say this, our metabolism affects our energy levels, and our muscle mass and body fat also affect our energy levels. When you bring the two together, you have the opportunity to create lots of energy, raise a person's self-esteem, and give them a new lease on life. But all of this isn't easy to attain.
Some people have really high rates of metabolism. In other words, when they consume food, their bodies burn it up almost as fast as then consume it. Then there are those of use who use our food intake so slowly, as to not even notice that we're burning calories. These people who burn quickly are often slim and trim, the people who burn more slowly are the people with a tendency toward obesity. The people with really high metabolic rates are generally the people who feel better and have the most energy. Their body is using the food intake to its maximum, and the body feels alive and full of vitality. The sluggish metabolism on the other hand, can have almost the opposite situation; low energy levels, with very little motivation to make lifestyle changes.
The only recourse we have in trying to control our body weight, metabolic burn and health is through our thorough understanding of the role food plays in our calorie consumption versus our calorie need, and control how much of the calories we take in.
Our metabolism functions also depend on how well we have taken care of our nutritional needs. The process of burning calories and creating energy is a delicate one, and one which must be carefully tended, or it can become imbalanced. It is often through these natural imbalances that we tend to "inherit' our metabolic rate, our body weight, and the lower energy levels.
I believe through careful analysis, and attention to each person's unique needs, we could bring about a more natural balance of the metabolic burn vs. the calorie intake. To a level where optimal health and weight control are in equilibrium.
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With the release of the new food group pyramid, there are officially five food groups. Oils and butters are now included as a food group; but for the purpose of this paper, we are still going to consider ourselves to have only four. The four food groups are grains, fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy. Let's take a look at each food group and discuss a few of the more important points from each group.
Grains cover a broad range of food: breads, cereals, rice, and pasta. That's quite an array of food. Breads come in so many varieties; pita, rye, white, and wheat are the more popular varieties. Cereals are so numerous there's not enough room on fifty pages to discuss the varieties offered. Rice and pasta are a little more limited in their offerings, but are still quite varied. Almost every choice we make in this group will have vitamins and minerals added for our nutritional supplementation. That's a good thing, since most of us won't consume our recommended dietary allowance, or even get close without the fortification of our milk and grain food group.
The next food group to be discussed is the vegetable group. Okay, here is the opportunity to score real nutritional "brownie" points, since it's almost impossible to make a bad choice, or even overeat. The only members of this food group that we must be careful to not overdo are the starchy vegetables. These vegetables have a tendency to turn into sugar once consumed, and we usually don't need an excess of sugar.
Fruits are a healthful category, so long as we remember to watch our consumption of fruits that provide too much sugar. Most fruits contain naturally occurring sugars; although these occur naturally in the food, it doesn't mean we need to consume uncontrolled quantities. A healthy daily allowance of fruit includes about 4 servings.
The meat, poultry, fish, dry beans and eggs food group contains the protein your body needs in order to develop properly. Without protein, your brain and many other body organs do not properly develop. If not properly developed, they will not work properly. Protein is one of the most important pieces of our growth and development needs. The down side in this food group, would be the fact that animal meats have naturally occurring cholesterol, and although some cholesterol is good for us, too much is unhealthy.
The last food group we're going to discuss is the dairy food. Milk, yogurt, and cheese belong to this food group. Again, one of the most important vitamins we need can be found in this food group. Calcium is essential to the optimal functioning our cell processes, and the growth of our bones. Calcium has a tremendous effect on the health of our heart and other vital organs. Inadequate consumption of calcium can lead to long-term life altering consequences. Osteoporosis is the leader among crippling of post menopausal women, and it is simply due to a lack of needed calcium during the earlier years.
It is absolutely necessary for everyone, children and adults to understand the importance each of these four food groups plays in our healthy development, from childhood to old age.
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The foods of the food pyramid are necessary for our optimal health. But in what quantities and which ones are the best? These are questions that must be tailored to our individual needs. And the answers will benefit our unique needs. Healthy for me, is not the same as healthy for you. Everyone's nutritional needs are different, and everyone's level of calorie consumption is different
As you study the food pyramid published by the USDA, we can examine some of the better foods, and try to decide what particular formulas make us the healthiest on average. The average person needs an hour of physical exercise, six to eleven servings of grains, two to four servings of fruit, three to five servings of vegetables, two to three servings of meat, two to three servings of milk, and enough water to make it all work.
The guidelines found on the general chart of the pyramid are as listed above, and this could be the formula for an eighty year old man, or a fifteen year old girl. The recommended daily calorie intake is just as vague and generalized as the daily food intake pyramid. Can you see how this might not work for either one? When a guideline published is this general, it is up to the individual to determine what food regimen will keep them at their healthiest, provide the caloric intake necessary, but not excessive.
According to the guides published by the USDA, calorie needs vary from one age group to another, one gender to another. So how do you determine what your individual needs are? You can setup a journal for recording your daily caloric intake for about a month. Make a note of your weight each day. If you don't gain any weight during the course of that month, you're eating your recommended calorie level in order to maintain your weight. Now, take that calorie information, use the food pyramid and comprise a combination of foods that will help you achieve this recommended daily intake, and still be enough to be filling and please the palette. You now have an individualized healthy eating plan.
If your goal is to cut calorie consumption, you would be among the latest wave of health conscious individuals who believe that a low calorie intake keeps us in our healthiest condition. There have been studies done with rats that lend credibility to this claim. Lowering the rat's body weight by only 10% yielded a longer life; longer life spans were noted for up to a 30% cut in daily calorie intake. Anything past that point produced unhealthy consequences. Now, exactly how this translates into human life spans, we're not sure.
Once the importance of a particular food plan is understood by us, it is a simple as learning our multiplication tables. We simply memorize the food requirements, and incorporate it into our daily intake as needed. As you take the time to incorporate a healthy food plan, don't' forget the necessity of exercise in our daily lives. In order to keep our bodies healthy and functioning as expected, we need to keep it fit. This comes through proper amounts of exercise
This guide will not work for Brother Bill or Sister Sue, but it is the unique blueprint for you. It is at this point in the process that we seem to lack the direction to finish what the government started. Maybe we need to incorporate these techniques into a class taught at school. Maybe this would give our young people the direction and tools they need in order to begin such a process, make it a lifetime habit, and pass it along to their children. Whatever the formula, your food intake and level of calorie content, will affect your general overall health everyday. Overeating can bring on obesity, under eating can bring about anemia; you need to find that one right guide for you, and plan, plan, plan.
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What happens to the food and water as they enter our digestive system? They are both necessary components of the digestive process. Our bodies need the water to effectively digest food and perform all the necessary functions we ask of it each day. You don't stop to realize what we ask of this marvelous machine, we just take it for granted that it's going to function properly. Do you know that your body is 98% water? Do you find this fact hard to believe? Most all of our body fluids are water, and many of our organs are mostly water. Do you suppose water is important to our daily functions? I would hazard a guess of YES
Let's take a look at the relationship of healthy eating and our body's daily intake of water. There is a direct correlation between eating healthy and consuming enough water to absorb the vitamins and minerals we need from the healthy food we've eaten.
During the course of consuming our food, we drink water with our meals. We don't even stop to think about the role this water plays in our digestive process. We drink it because we become thirsty when we eat. Stomach acids need the water in order to properly breakdown the food as it travels through our stomach, and nutrients are absorbed by the blood. The food continues down the path of the intestines, still being broken down and absorbed through the lining of the intestines, still requiring the presence of water. All of the digestive process must have water in order to happen as designed.
Proper flushing of the body, filtering of the blood, and transmission of waste from our bodies can only occur when there are enough fluids present. The only way for enough fluids to be present is in our consumption of water. Only through the intake of necessary amounts of water do our kidney's function as designed.
Many of the body's organs depend upon fresh blood supplies in order to function properly. The kidneys and intestines require vast amounts of water in order to accomplish the difficult task of flushing the waste from our body. Now, if you don't realize the importance of this task, you need to stop and think about waste. Wastes are produced from the daily processes your body goes through, toxic by-products that we don't need to live, and don't need to retain in our bodies. As a general rule, whatever we might need for our body should be absorbed as the food has passed through the intestines, whatever is left, is not needed.
At times, there are imbalances in our intestines that create an environment that won't allow for proper processing of food particles, or doesn't allow us to absorb any of the nutrients we need at all as they pass through our intestines. Stepping up our consumption of water can often correct this without the need for medication. We simply need to flush our system, as you might flush a slow drain.
Many of the processes our body performs each day, each hour, depend upon our digestive system to supply the needed nutrients and fluids. Proper digestion, from beginning to end, cannot take place without water, lots and lots of water.
When a person consumes a meal high in carbohydrate content, have you ever noticed how sleepy they become? Have you ever questioned why? Most of the effect comes from elevated blood sugar levels, this condition then makes us sleepy. Why do carbohydrates turn into sugar? Whenever you begin to break down carbohydrates, they turn into starch or cellulose. The starches can be broken down into simple sugars called monosaccharides, or complex sugars called disaccharides. Our body uses these sugars for the production of energy. When we consume food, our body turns the food into some usable form of energy. The food may go through a couple of other processes before it reaches the energy stage. Since carbohydrates are starches before they are saccharides, if your body doesn't need the energy, starch is a great storage vehicle for unnecessary glucose. Perhaps a simple explanation of the carbohydrate sugars and where we find them might help.
The sugars known as monosaccharides are glucose, galactose, and fructose. Glucose is the sugar produced by our bodies. Galactose is absorbed through our milk and yogurt consumption. Fructose is a sugar found in honey.
The sugars that are classified as disaccharides are sucrose, lactose, and maltose. Sucrose is common table sugar, lactose is the combination of glucose and galactose found in milk, and maltose is a product of starch digestion when combining glucose and glucose.
So what effect does this have on the body? Well, once you consume more sugar or starch or carbohydrates than you need, your body stores the excess as glycogen. The only people who actually benefit from excessive glycogen storage are marathon runners, who load up on carbs prior to a big race in order to be able to sustain extended period s of excessive exercise. Stored fat can become extreme, and your body reaches levels that classify you as morbidly obese. This is just such the case in America today. A vast majority of our population has reached obesity, and we are experiencing epidemic levels.
Over indulgence in carbohydrates therefore lends us to a tendency to become overweight. What happens in our bodies when we become overweight? Once our bodies are obese, many organs have trouble functioning, due to fat surrounding them, or simply the fact that we are too large for them to properly support.
Either way, too many carbohydrates leads to problems for our bodies. We can limit our intake of carbohydrates by consuming more fruits, vegetables, and lean meats. Less bread, rice, cereal, pasta, and grains lowers our intake of carbohydrates.
The other option we have is to simply increase our daily physical activity. Carbohydrates as previously pointed out are the fuel producer for the body. If we want to rid ourselves of more carbohydrates, we simply need to pickup our daily activity. If you aren't exercising, now would be a great time to start.
Responsible eating habits, proper nutrition and exercise, and an understanding of the foods you eat and what they contain that your body needs or doesn't need is the basic building block for overall good health.
This is a double sided coin. Does health affect intelligence? Yes. Does intelligence affect health? Yes. This is one of those wonderful situations where the cause and effect works both ways. What happens in one area, will generally affect the other.
It is a known and proven fact, that the eating and health habits we use as children, directly affects our level of development. This includes the brain. Protein, one of the most important basic life building blocks, works directly in the brain's development. No protein, no proper development.
Well, it doesn't take very much intuition here, to notice if the brain doesn't develop to optimal operation levels, you will not have a health conscious individual. Generally, you do not have individuals develop to become productive, prosperous citizens, and certainly not healthy, productive, prosperous citizens.
Past the consideration of intelligence development, our level of education and intelligence plays a tremendous role in our ability to educate ourselves about the health options we should exercise. With generations prior to the 20th century, physical energy expenditures used up whatever nutritional resources you had provided earlier. Physical work and a real lack of nutritional supplements kept the body in constant need of nourishment. That is a time past. Today, with the advent of the computer, physical activity is no longer a part of the work equation. We no longer lack for vitamins and minerals, thanks to the boom in the vitamin market.
Today, we must determine how much nourishment we need, how much physical exercise we need, and how best to accomplish those ends. Calorie needs, nutritional needs, physical needs, and education about those needs now is information we should all understand, at least as it applies to our individual self.
Our level of income directly affects our eating habits. Did you know that? How much money you make helps to determine what you will choose and how healthy you will be. Doesn't really make sense, if you don't' look at the broader picture. In the big picture, however, here is the view: you are educated, have a degree, and are exposed to tons of information during your college years. You are exposed to health classes, athletes, and all sorts of professional people who already understand the importance of healthy eating habits in your life.
You graduate college, your income levels are quite nice, and you have the opportunity to purchase magazines, health and fitness of course. Can you see how your education and intelligence levels affect your health now? This is a generalization that has proven itself time and again. All you have to do is observe your developed countries versus the third world, underdeveloped countries. Standard of living and health are directly related.
If the evidence presented above is not enough to satisfy your curiosity concerning the role intelligence plays in our health, take the time to visit the US Census. This information is available through the internet. There you will find all kinds of statistics, from income averages in areas of the United States, to education levels in those same places. Also available is information related to the household. Check for yourself. You can see a direct relationship in many areas of the country between income levels and health statistics for that area.
To eat or not to eat? This is a question that confronts us daily, as we go from home to work, work to home, and back again. We have designated times for breakfast and lunch. Dinner would be the only place where we really have any freedom as to the time we consume our meal. But do we really want something to eat? Are we really hungry? Or do we eat simply because the time to eat has arrived?
With generations prior to the 20th century, eating was an opportunity to stop and rest, and actually consume nutrition because your body told you it needed nourishment. Physical energy expenditures had used up whatever resources you had provided earlier. Physical work and a real lack of nutritional supplements kept the body in constant need of nourishment. That is a time past. Today, with the advent of the computer, physical activity is no longer a part of the work equation. We no longer lack for vitamins and minerals, thanks to the boom in the vitamin market.
Information is more readily available for us to learn about our individual needs, and regulate what we consume. But consumption and "programmed eating" is more rampant than ever. We watch television, and see something good to eat. What do we do? We go to the refrigerator and hunt something to eat. Our body hasn't notified us of any real hunger. But our visual senses say, hmmm, that looks really good. I believe I'd like to consume some food.
There is a real difference in what we need to eat to stay alive, what we need to eat to stay healthy, and what we want to eat thanks to advertising and designated lunch hours. What we need to eat to stay alive is such a small portion of food; it surprises even the most prepared reader. Your body must consume only five to six hundred calories and lots of water to stay alive. When faced with life-threatening situations, your body will revert to a "starvation" mode. In other words, it cuts back on bodily functions to just bare minimums necessary for life. In this way, it cuts out any excess need for extra calories.
The calories intake necessary for healthy functioning is a level unique to each individual person and can range from around 1200 calories to over 2000. The amount of food we need to satisfy the advertising and programmed eating habits is over 3000. In other words, thanks to advertising and "It's time to eat lunch" programming, we consume at least 1000 more calories than we need each day. This is why our nation is facing an obesity epidemic and our children need medically prescribed diets to lose weight.
If we could take a week and pay attention to what our body really says to us about its needs, we would be a healthier society without a lot of effort. It is because we listen to the advertisements, the restaurant menus, and the call of "it's lunchtime, where are we gonna eat?" that we have problems now.
You see it everyday, news and information that bring to the front our problem with our weight. It is a national problem. It's not just your older sedentary population; it's not just your overworked middle-age population; and it's not just your nerdy teenage population. It is a national epidemic.
The first question I always have, is how did we get here? How did we go from one of the most physically fit nations, to just wallowing in our weight? The answers I believe lie in an observation I have made watching people as they go about their daily lives.
The first thing you notice about everyone today, is how blessed we are as a country. That's just a wonderful thing to observe. But stop and think about that, for just a moment. What happens when you have everything you want or need? You become complacent, in other words lazy and fat. Alright, you have contributor number one.
The next thing you notice is how well organized we are with out time. Everyone is an expert on multi-tasking. We can accomplish so much with our day that we have organized ourselves right down to bedtime. What have we left out? The time we need for appreciating what we have and reflecting upon the things that make us happy. No time for family time, cooking meals, and eating as a unit. We are in a hurry to get to our next scheduled activity. We have also created amazingly high levels of stress. Stress is the second contributor.
The next thing you need to notice is what wonderful jobs we have and how educated our workforce has become. The vast majority of Americans have jobs that require very little physical activity, thanks to the mental activity that is taking place. What does this do to our bodies? We no longer need to use them to provide our necessities. Our mind is our money earner. The physical body just gets us there. Contributor number three: no physical activity
The last contributor to this epidemic is our business world, our insatiable keep up with the Jones' attitudes and the advertisers who play on this. Let's face it; our eating habits usually are a product of the last best selling food item. McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell are living proof that we are a nation of advertising junkies. We don't eat because we know it's good for us, or even because we're hungry. We often eat just because of the commercial we saw on TV.
When you combine all of these contributors into one huge problem, do you know what you have? You have an obese population, with an ever increasing list of health-related issues. This is where we are today. We have a population that doesn't really realize how they got here, or where to go to correct the problem. Half of them don't even think we have a problem. Many of the obese will tell you they are satisfied with their weight, and don't intend to do anything. They don't intend to do anything until they are diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes, or thyroid conditions. Then they realize maybe there is a problem. The down side to this? By the time you reach this stage, it is often too late and too difficult to correct one health problem without creating another.
In the beginning, there was cereal. The cereal was rather plain, not very tasty. So, the ingenious cereal manufacturer added sugar. He came up with great ways of adding sugar to the cereal, so that all the kids loved the way the cereal tasted. This was a wonderful invention, and it worked for some twenty odd years. Then one day, someone thought to ask what all that sugar might do to the children consuming the cereal.
The cereal wagon train had to circle the wagons, and come up with a better plan. Thus was born the "vitamin fortified" label you see on the box of cereal now. Vitamins and minerals essential to the development of our healthy children were added to the cereal mix, and all the parents were happy.
As a fairy tale, the cereal industry is a little lacking in appeal, as a breakfast food; however, they've remained an expert. When cereal first came into being, almost 200 years ago, it did not have very much appeal. It tasted awful, and didn't look much better. The purpose of the invention was for convenience and health. And those were the only purposes it served; taste and presentation were not figured into the equation.
Then along came the Kellogg brothers, and cereal received a boost. Taste became an issue in the effort to sell more cereal. The World's Fair was in Chicago, and the cereal industry was primed for their piece of the pie. It came, too. The cereal was a smashing success, puffed rice. It's still around today, with sugar added. It had the added sugar at the fair, too. It sold like fire ripping through old lumber. The Kellogg Company was on the map. You still buy cereal from them today. A better grade of cereal, with many drastic changes since the turn of the 20th century, but cereal none the less.
There is truth to the story in that at some point in time, parents began to question the good that cereal packed with sugar could do for our children. They believed them to be consuming entirely too much sugar, and not enough of the food they needed to meet their nutritional needs. The Kellogg Company, and others like them, saw part of their market slipping away, and set about to correct the problem.
It was during the 70's that so many cereals acquired the "fortified with vitamins and minerals" labeling that you still see today. Thanks to many advances in the processing and extracting of vitamins from their natural sources, they could be added to the cereal mix during the early stages of processing, and presto, good cereal that's good for you. This continues today in many of the varieties of cereal we have available, many of them just for your health. Many cereals have combined wheat products, grains, and fruit into cereals that are not only vitamin fortified but also health fortified. These cereals provide your vitamins, minerals, grain, and some fruit needs when you sit down to your breakfast meal. Cereals are one instance where demand has had a profound effect on the market.