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Nutrition | Foods for Health | Good - Bad Food | Omega-3 | Supplements | Other superfood products |
Under Construction Basics | Essential Nutrients | Good - Bad Food | Food Facts | Food Pyramids | Alternative Medicine Note: This is a bunch of facts I started collecting, but I haven't made sense out of them yet. Categories of NutritientsThe primary puropse of eating is to provide nutrients necessary for energy, growth, and mainenance of the body, and proper functioning of body organs. Food consists of:
Background They also identified a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease risk. Animal fat, saturated fat, which raised LDL (bad) cholesterol was blamed. Starting in 1977, the government started telling all Americans to eat less fat.
This all led the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to issue recommend a diet with more carbohydrates and less fat than the average diet in the 80's.
There were several studies done in the late '80s, where they actually calculated how much longer you would live if you cut back on saturated fat. The result was a week to a few months. In the '50s, '60s, and '70s, there were a school of British researchers said it was sugar, flour, white rice, what we now call "easily digestible carbohydrates" or "high glycemic-index carbohydrates", which were to blame for "Western diseases" such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and some cancers (colon, breast.) Somewhere between 1976 and 1986 obesity rates in the US shot up from 12-14% to 22-25%. The fast food industry and it's high carb (french fries and jumbo sodas) is commonly blamed along with the common use of high-fructose corn syrup and our sedentary life style.
Diet guru Robert Atkins has been an advocate of reducing carbs for 30 years.
Current evidence indicates there were flaws in resulting recomendations. Substituting carbohydrates
can mess up the body's glucose and insulin levels and reduce HDL (good) cholesterol. Increasing the ratio
of LDL (bad) cholesterol to HDL increases the risk of heart disease. Insulin is the hormone that controls the deposition of sugar and carbohydrates and fat in your body. Most agree that if insulin levels are high, you'll preferentially store calories as fat; and that as long as insulin levels stay high, you won't be able to get to that fat to use it for fuel.
See: Diet Wars: Frontline interview of Gary Taubes. Current thinking is:
Best Sources of nutrients
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Conceived by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Intended to convey the message "Fat is bad" and its corollary "Carbs are good". These sweeping statmements are now being questioned. | |||||||||||||
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| The Harvard School of Public Health, published this in Eat, Drink, And Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating., Walter C. Willett, P. J. Skerrett and Edward L. Giovannucci. Simon & Schuster, 2001. | ||||||||||||
Printable version of pyramids. In 2011 the USDA rolled out its new "MyPlate" program, with 5 food groups; fruits, vegetables, grains, protein and dairy.
In a recent article in the Wise Traditions journal, Adele Hite shares "A Tale of Two Breakfasts." She compares a breakfast that's compliant with USDA dietary guidelines with one that complies with the Weston A Price Foundation's Healthy 4 Life dietary guidelines.
Her Summary: | |||||||||||||
In Don't Blame the Fat, June 23, 2014, Time they say fat is not the problem. All the vilification of fat (see background above) and reduced fat diets over the last 30+ years have not helped. Heart disease is still the number 1 killer (although lower because of better emergency care and cholesterol-controlling drugs). Type 2 diabetes and obesity have increased dramatically over that time. "Most experts agree we'd be healthier if more of our diet were made up of whaat the writer Michael Pollan bluntly calls 'real Food.' The problem over the past few decades doesn't just stem from refined carbohydrates messing with our metabolism. More and more of what we eat comes to us custom designed by the food industry to make us want more. There's evidence that processing itself rases the danger posed by food. Studies suggest that processed meat may increase the risk of heart disease that unprocessed meat does not."
See other references Popular DietsDr. Atkins - Low Carb. - High fat The Zone - High fat South Shore - Low Carb. Dr. Dean Ornish - High carbo, Low fat Weight Watchers - Low calories Suzzane Summers - Don't eat fat and carbs together GuidelinesEat raw vegitables as much as possible. All enzymes and most vitamins are extremely sensitive to heat.Be careful when browning or burning food especially when barbecuing; fat dripping onto an open flame produces polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a carcinogen. When amino acids and otrher chemicals found in muscle are exposed to high temperatures, heerocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs), another carciogen, are created. Even browned or buned bread crusts contain carciognetic substances. Avoid aluminum cookware.
Fruits and Vegitables
Other superfood products:
References: See Also: Foods for Health Good - Bad Food Diet and Fitness at iVillage. Vitamin Synergy Alternative Medicine Grass-fed vs Grain-fed beef Organic food in Home & Garden Low-Carb and Low-Glycemic Index Diets Best for Keeping Weight Off | Healthland.TIME.com Food ratings at the GoodGuide Food Facts (Caffeine) Environmental Nutrition Pineapple Return to Don's Home. |