Tell Me Something I Don’t Know….    with Lady J   

Today I want to continue our conversation about nutrition.  Notice I did not say, finish.  It is a topic which you will need to study on your own and find out what fits your body the best.  However, I am going to talk today about the three things that are in all foods and some of the pitfalls that can happen when reading the labels on food.  There was so much praise and thanksgiving for the labels that were revised a few years ago and yet reading them can be tricky.  If you don’t read them right, or understand that the same words placed in a different order can mean very different things, you can be lulled into feeling good about something that is really not helpful at all. 

So the three things are Protein, Carbohydrate and Fat.  Food labels can tell how much of each type of these are in A SINGLE SERVING.  Let’s review what each of these macro nutrients do for your body.  Protein is made up of Amino Acids which are the building blocks which your body needs to build muscle, keep your immune system strong and your body overall strong and healthy.  There is much debate about how much, what type and how to cook/not cook it; that is where your research comes in.

Fat yields equally as much confusion, misunderstanding and theories about good versus bad and what is best for you. Again, it is research for you to do.  However fats are one of the three main macronutrient groups in the human diet. They are a major and dense source of food energy and stores energy in excess of what the body needs immediately.  There are many other uses of fat in the body including playing a vital role in maintaining healthy skin and hair plus being food for the brain.

Carbohydrate (CHO), any CHO, when broken down for the body to use is sugar. Eating them produces the same effect in the body as eating sugar straight out of the sugar bowl.  Most folks will agree a high-sugar diet is bad.  Now you know foods high in CHOs are bad because, metabolically speaking, sugar and CHO are the same thing! There is not a single disease state recognized in medical research associated with CHO deficiency; however, there are dozens of disease states associated with insulin and inflammation caused by CHO/sugar excess.

So, there you have a simple explanation of how food is used by the body.  Believe me when I say it is much more complicated than the last 3 paragraphs make it seem …. and yet it is just that simple.  Now let’s look at those pesky labels, and yet so useful once you know just a few facts in how to interpret them.

In many theories, when you read the label ingredients you will know whether it is good for you or not.  Again, these theories are often confusing and need to be decided by the individual based on any number of reasons.  What I want to speak about here is looking for five things that make a difference no matter what theory you decide upon.

 These are: Serving size, calories, CHO, protein and total fat per serving.

Serving size is especially important because we as Americans don’t usually just eat the serving size stated on the package.  Therefore we are not getting just the ingredients listed.  Usually the serving size is a half or even a third of what we would normally eat.  This is especially true of cereal -- who eats a half cup of corn flakes?  Who eats only a handful of chips at a setting? Yet the bag says it has 20 servings and everything listed is based on that fact.

With that, I have to quit for this month.  Serving size is probably the most tricky and definitely the most important thing to look at.  Next month we will continue with the rest of this list.  In the meantime, start noticing what the label really says just by serving size.  Happy Halloween – don’t let those labels trick you.