There are many opinions out there as to how to eat healthy. Carbs are bad for you! Carbs are great for you! Stay away from bread! And so on. Well, as a nursing student and someone who has been obsessed with health and nutrition for quite sometime now I thought I'd try to explain my logical approach to nutrition. So lets start with the basics: we eat to live. Eating provides our bodies with fuel and building blocks to maintain proper functioning (dare I say 'maintain homeostasis'?). So what we eat matters, big time.
What do our bodies use for fuel? At a cellular level our body's cells take in Glucose and convert it to ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which is then used as energy. Thanks to the prevelance of diabetes in our society most people know what glucose is: it's sugar. Yep, that's it, our body needs sugar. Which explains why we crave sugar so much. Naturally occuring sources of pure sugar are not very common, so we have a natural urge to eat it whenever it's readily available. Corporations and food producers have figured out that by enhancing their products with sugars (like High Fructose Corn Syrup) that people will crave their products, so take a peak at the ingredients and it's more common than not to see Fructose or Glucose in some form as an ingredient.
To be honest while our bodies need it to function, we eat WAY too much sugar. Or rather, we eat way too much of the wrong source of it. Lets look at the basic food groups: you have your Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Fats. Proteins are the meats, beans, and nuts, they are full of amino acids which are the building blocks of our bodies. Carbohydrates are the sugars, ie, the fuel we were just discussing. Fats are the lipids, which we do in fact need, ever heard of a phospholipid bilayer? It's what forms the membrane around ever single one of our cells.
I'm going to focus on the Proteins and Carbs. Think about it, Proteins are building blocks and Carbs are fuel. We know where proteins come from, where do carbs come from? Plants. I like to think of it this way, plants can't run, you grow em, pick em, and eat em. Animals (our main source of protein) can run, they require exercise to catch and cook and eat. If you run alot you need alot of protein, because you're using your muscles which need to be built and repaired. You also need alot of veggies because that's your source of fuel. You can mod a car all you want, it wont run unless you put fuel in it.
The Western diet has it backwards, the protein is usually the focus while the carbs are the "side dishes". Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a perfectly cooked medium rare 12 oz ribeye steak, but we should be dressing up those carbs and making those the stars of the show with the meat being the side dishes. Again, I'm gonna go to the basics. Meat is muscle, your body is going to break it down and use it to build muscle, if you are doing nothing to cause your body to need to use it to build or repair your muscles, e.g. exercise, then your body is going to put those amino acids into storage to use when you do exercise, i.e. convert it to adipose tissue (aka those horrible love handles!). But those carbs, it's gonna break those down immediately to form glucose and send it everywhere to be used up for energy, and use the nonsoluble parts (the fiber and such) to flush out your system and keep everything clean and moving (if you don't sweep before you mop the floor doesn't get clean, same thing goes for your digestive track and the fiber is what does the sweeping).
So why does the Adkins diet work? Why do people loose weight when they eat lots of protein and limit their carbs? Basically the body will adapt to what you are giving it, it's a longer process but your body can convert protein into an energy source if it has to. Like when someone goes to the store and gets the wrong kind of milk, you love whole milk but the wife bought skim. You wanna eat your cereal so you'll settle for the skim since it's the only thing available. But as soon as the wife goes to the store and gets the "real milk", not that stupid "milk water", you drink that stuff up. As soon as people on the Adkins diet start eating normally again most of the time they gain all the weight right back plus some. Why? Same thing happens with all fad and crash diets, your normal diet is what got you into the mess, so when you go back to eating normally you end up with the same result.
So then how are we supposed to eat? It depends on your activity level. If you ride in the car to work, sit at a desk all day, ride home in your car, and spend the evening on the couch socializing or at the computer you're only getting at most 10 minutes of actual active exercise a day. That's no where near enough to warrent eating much protein. Now if you go to the gym before or after work or take a dog for a long walk or run around chasing the kids or even do housework then you're burning calories, working muscles, and can eat more protein. That being said, the average adult doesn't need more than say, one meal the includes protein like beef or pork more than once a week. Beef and pork muscle are alot like our muscle, so it's easy to convert to a usable form and if there's too much or if it isn't needed then it is converted directly into adipose tissue (remember those love handles?). Chicken and fish on the other hand aren't similar to our own so it takes more converting, and thus more energy(aka calories) being used to convert it into a usable form, not to mention the other health benefits by eating protein sources like fish, like those omega-3 fatty acids that people like to talk about these days.
So basically in summary, if you have little to moderate amounts of daily exercise (or like a slim figure) eat lots of food from plant sources like veggies and grains, eat chicken and fish often, and limit beef and pork to a weekly or monthly treat or date night. If you want to be muscular, in addition to the exercise, you need more easily used proteins to build and repair that muscle so eat more beef.
And just a quick side note: if you can't look at it and figure out it's ingredients or if you can't pronounce the ingredients on the list on the box, maybe you shouldn't be eating it.
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