Nutrition
Healthy
weight management isn't about feeling deprived, restricted or
following the latest fad diets. We'll show you some effective
techniques and tips to help you keep your weight under control
without taking all the fun out of life!
Putting
together a nutritious eating plan doesn't have to be confusing
or take a dietician to decipher. Learn how easy it is to nourish
your body with everything it needs while letting your adventurous
spirit entice you into trying out new foods
Aim
for fitness...
Aim for a healthy weight.
Be physically active each day.
Build
a Healthy Base...
Let the Pyramid guide your food choices.
Choose a variety of grains daily, especially whole grains.
Choose a variety of fruits and vegetables daily.
Keep food safe to eat.
Choose Sensibly...
Choose a diet that is low in saturated fat and
cholesterol and moderate in total fat.
Choose beverages and foods to moderate your intake of sugars.
Choose and prepare foods with less salt.
If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation.
How
to Eat Smarter
In a world that is raining food, making healthy choices about
what and how to eat is not easy. Here are some rules to live
by - By Christine Gorma | TIME
magazine
Saturday,
Oct. 11, 2003
It's 6:45 p.m. after a bruising day at the office and a hair-raising
commute on the freeway, you are standing in the kitchen about
to prepare a healthy, satisfying dinner for your spouse, your
two school-age children and yourself. As usual, all they want
to know is "What's for dinner?" and "When do
we eat?" You dump a box of thin spaghetti into a pot of
boiling water, zap 3 cups of green beans in the microwave, pop
a loaf of frozen garlic bread into the toaster oven and pour
a medium-size jar of marinara sauce into a saucepan to simmer.
While all that's bubbling, you chop up half a head of iceberg
lettuce and a couple of tomatoes for the salad, which you'll
sprinkle with a light dressing. Dessert will be two scoops of
frozen yogurt per person and a plate of assorted low-fat cookies
for the family to share. Sounds pretty healthy, right?
Wrong. While
this meal may be better than what most Americans eat for dinner,
it's enough food for a family twice the size of yours. In addition,
it contains some nutritional traps that in the best-case scenario
will make you fat and in the worst will increase your chances
of developing diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer.
Think you know the pitfalls? Read on. You may discover some
surprises.
Here
are just a few of the problems:
•
Most "light" salad dressings are too heavy on sugar
and salt and too light on nutrition. A better choice is a
simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, which—although packed
with calories—contains lots of heart-healthy mono-unsaturated
fatty acids and no saturated fat.
* You're
serving your family too many highly processed foods. The latest
research shows that such foods won't keep them satisfied for
very long and may make them hungrier in the long run.
* Having
different kinds of cookies to choose from makes it more likely
that your family will eat more cookies than they should. The
fewer our choices, the less we eat.
* Your
portion sizes are far too generous. According to the U.S.
Food Guide Pyramid, you're giving each member of your family
4 servings of spaghetti, 112 servings of marinara sauce and
2 servings of frozen yogurt. The whole meal contains 1,500
calories per person, or 80% of the daily requirement for a
sedentary office worker.
* Let's
not even get started on whether the tomatoes should be cooked
or raw, how much salt, sugar and trans fat there is in the
garlic bread, or how many calories are packed into that marinara
sauce. It just goes to show that it's hard to eat healthy
even when we try. We've all heard that fruits and vegetables
are good for us, that restaurant portions are too big, that
we should exercise more. But even a casual glance at public-health
statistics suggests that Americans don't know how to put that
information into practice. Two out of three Americans are
overweight or obese. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes among
children is climbing. And any gains we've made against heart
disease by quitting smoking may be about to disappear. Alarmed
by the worsening trends, health experts have unleashed a flood
of nutritional advice for consumers much of it contradictory.
One expert
says red meat is bad. Another says bacon keeps you trim. Someone
says skip the potatoes, and someone else says eat the skin.
And let's face it, controversy sells. Diet books and magazine
articles try to grab our attention by telling us everything
we thought we knew was wrong. (It's not.)
Even
the government-approved labels on our food can lead us astray.
Serving sizes bear no relationship to the helpings we usually
eat. Low-fat products are not necessarily low in calories. And
now the Food and Drug Administration says we should be on the
lookout for trans fat—a lesser-known type of fat that
is every bit as bad for the heart as saturated fat—though
we won't learn which products are the worst offenders until
2006. Meanwhile, the food pyramid, which serves as the basis
for all meals prepared in the federal school-lunch program,
is about to be changed. However, the next revision won't be
out until 2005.
"People can feel like a ping-pong ball," says Dr.
David Katz, head of the Yale School of Medicine Prevention Research
Center and author of The Way to Eat (Sourcebooks; 2002). "They
are being batted in one direction and then another." Not
that we necessarily mind. Being perplexed can ease our conscience.
As long as we can point to a general state of nutritional confusion,
we don't have to take responsibility for our ever expanding
waistlines.
The
truth is that nutritionists have a fairly good idea about what
constitutes a healthy diet as well as plenty of solid evidence
to back that up. As a rule, they tell us, we should eat lots
of fruits and vegetables, favor whole grains over highly processed
cereals and make red meat an occasional treat rather than the
daily centerpiece of our evening meal. And we shouldn't eat
any more than our body needs.
The
problem is that no matter how much we think we know about what
goes into a healthy meal, we often misjudge the results. Some
vegetable dishes, it turns out, are healthier than others, some
grain products are less processed than others, some fish are
safer than others. You may think you are eating right, but by
making subtle changes in what you eat and how you eat it, you
could start eating considerably healthier.
The
rewards are worth the effort. Studies show that as much as 80%
of heart disease and 90% of diabetes can be tied to unhealthy
eating and lifestyle habits. Doctors have proved that a diet
emphasizing fruits and vegetables as well as small amounts of
nuts and dairy products can lower blood pressure and "bad"
cholesterol as effectively as many medications. And evidence
is growing that adding fiber to your diet and avoiding highly
refined foods can help prevent or delay the onset of Type 2
diabetes.
You
don't have to sacrifice flavor. You don't have to go hungry.
"It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing," says
Dr. Donald Hensrud of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "That
attitude can actually make it harder." You do need to put
in some effort—much of it in the kitchen—and accept
that there really is no free lunch. But with a little planning
and a better understanding of some of the basic food traps,
we can all eat a whole lot better and smarter.
You
need Less Food Than You Think
"Everything in moderation" is a great motto until
you realize that moderate means different things to different
people. Better to nail down some specifics and measure them
using a tough-to-fudge yardstick—the much dreaded but
ultimately very helpful concept of the calorie. Stop, don't
turn the page just yet. We're not going to get tediously obsessive
about this. But whether you, like most Americans, need to lose
weight or you just want to maintain the figure you already have,
you've got to know a little something about calories.
At
its heart, the rule for losing weight is simple: eat fewer calories
than you burn. As anyone who has ever tried to shed a couple
of pounds knows all too well, that's often harder than it sounds.
Eat too little, and your body ratchets down its metabolism so
that it doesn't need as much energy and you regain weight more
easily. One way to counteract that is to boost your level of
physical activity to increase the number of calories you burn.
But
when it comes to weight control, exercise—though necessary—can
take you only so far. Think about it, and you'll understand
why. Food is so plentiful and so readily available that you're
always going to be able to eat more than you can sweat off.
The average American consumes 530 calories more per day now
than he or she did in 1970. That's roughly what you'd get from
eating 21/2 cups of cooked pasta. You would have to walk an
extra two hours a day to burn that off. That doesn't mean you
should forget about exercising—the benefits to your heart,
bones and peace of mind are just too great. It does mean you
have to pay more attention to the "calories in" side
of the equation.
Few
of us really get this message. "People don't understand
the most basic things about calories," says Marion Nestle,
chair of the department of nutrition, food studies and public
health at New York University. "Larger portions have more
calories. Eating more often means that you eat more calories.
Having food in front of you means you eat more calories."
Even
if you're happy when you step on the scales, you can't eat the
way you did when you were a teenager—or even just a decade
ago. As you grow older, your body needs fewer calories to keep
going. Certain exercises—like yoga or weight training—help
counteract the trend because they build muscle, which burns
more calories than fat. But at some point, to avoid gaining
weight, you will have to eat less.
The
Secrets of Portion Control
So, what are some smart ways of cutting back? Start by fooling
both your eyes and your stomach. As you reduce the amount of
food you eat, use smaller plates to keep your meals from looking
skimpy. Begin a couple of meals each week with an apple or a
cup of soup. Either will help curb your appetite. The apple,
besides being nutritious and only 80 calories, is full of soluble
fiber, which keeps the stomach from emptying too quickly. And
there is something about the texture and consistency of soup
(broth-, not cream-based, low in sodium and not more than 150
calories) that is particularly satisfying to the stomach. Several
intriguing studies have found that other liquids, like fruit
juices or sodas—which are often high in calories—do
nothing to suppress the appetite.
Watch
out for the portion-size trap. For reasons known only to bureaucrats,
the portion sizes provided in the U.S. government's food pyramid
can differ dramatically from those indicated on a product's
food label. (One set of figures is regulated by the Department
of Agriculture, and the other, which appears on product labels,
is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.) A single
serving of pasta is 12 cup (cooked) according to the usda, 1
cup according to the FDA and at least 2 cups according to most
families.
Eat
a variety of fruits and vegetables, but limit your choices of
everything else, particularly snacks. Giving folks a wide choice
of foods in a single meal, scientists have shown, encourages
them to eat more. "It works for every species ever tested—humans,
rats, fish, cats," says Susan Roberts, professor of nutrition
at Tufts University in Boston. If there are two types of cookies
on a plate, the temptation is to eat one of each.
Eventually,
you will have to become familiar with the calorie count of your
foods. Just a couple of days of measuring or weighing what you
eat and calculating the calories you consume can be a real eye-opener.
You don't have to do this for the rest of your life, just long
enough to get a feel for it. Many nutritionists recommend eating
healthy frozen dinners, whose calorie counts are printed on
the package, as a good way to make the transition to smaller
portion sizes. How many calories you should eat in a day depends
on whether you want to lose or maintain weight. The American
Heart Association's rule of thumb is to multiply your weight
in pounds by 13 (15 if you're active). If you want to lose weight,
subtract 250 calories.
All
Fats Are Not Created Equal
for more than 30 years, most researchers agreed that the healthiest
diets were those low in percentage of calories attributable
to fat. Now they realize that just as there are good and bad
types of cholesterol, there are good and bad types of fat. The
good fats—found in foods like fish, olive oil, avocados
and walnuts—actually improve cholesterol levels in the
blood and significantly reduce the risk that the heart will
suddenly stop. As for the bad fats, there are now two villains
instead of just one. Saturated fats—typically found in
red meat, butter and ice cream—are still champion artery
cloggers. But trans fats—found primarily in processed
foods, such as margarines and many commercially baked or fried
foods but also in whole milk—may be even worse.
Good
fats do more than help protect the heart. They also seem to
delay hunger pangs. "People on these high-starch, low-fat
diets are often hungry soon after they eat. They would be more
satisfied eating nuts or a salad with a full-fat dressing,"
says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition
at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of Eat, Drink
and Be Healthy (Fireside; 2001). "And longer-term studies
are showing that people tend to be able to control their weight
better over the long run on a moderate or higher-fat diet than
on a low-fat diet."
Fats
have more flavor—a fact that was not lost on the editors
of Cooking Light magazine. Since the mid-1990s, they have slipped
a modicum of butter into their recipes. "You have to make
food enjoyable," says Jill G. Melton, senior editor of
Cooking Light (which, like TIME, is owned by AOL Time Warner).
"If something tastes bad, you're not going to want it again."
Just
remember that there's a smart way to include fat in your diet
and lots of unhealthy ones. Good fats contain double the calories
(9 calories per gram) of either proteins or carbohydrates (4
calories per gram). So there's little room for error. If you
eat nuts, you're going to have to eat less of something else.
What
about the Mediterranean diet? you ask. Researchers have long
been fascinated by the traditional Greek and Italian diets of
the 1960s, which contained as much as 40% fat but didn't trigger
a lot of heart attacks. Don't assume that what worked for Greeks
and Italians 40 years ago will work for you. After all, they
typically ate a pound of fruit a day (equal to four medium apples)
and little red meat, and many of them got lots of exercise tilling
fields and tending livestock.
"The
Mediterranean diet works well in the Mediterranean," says
Yale's Katz. "My concern about it in the U.S. is that people
will continue to go to Burger King but just dump olive oil over
their French fries."
You
can go overboard trying to avoid trans fat. Yes, there is a
small amount of trans fat in whole milk, but whole milk is what
most pediatricians recommend for children from the age of 1
to 2. Their brains need all kinds of fats to develop properly.
After they reach age 2, you've got to be on the lookout for
saturated fats as well. "You don't want people to think
trans fats are the only bad guys," says Alice Lichtenstein,
a nutrition professor at Tufts University in Boston and a frequent
spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. "If a cracker
has 2% trans and 2% saturated fat, it's better than 7% saturated
and 0% trans." Finally, no matter how low McDonald's reduces
the amount of trans fat in its French fries, they are never
going to be a health food. Which brings us to ...The Potato
Factor
It's not that spuds are so bad; it's that they're misunderstood—not
to mention deep-fried and drowned in sour cream and cheese.
America's much beloved tuber definitely has a dual personality.
A good source of potassium (particularly if you eat the skin)
and a great thickener for soups, the potato still doesn't have
all the benefits bestowed by more colorful produce like broccoli,
Brussels sprouts and green beans. v This problem of mistaken
identity extends to quite a few of the foods we commonly call
carbohydrates. First, a tiny rant about the word carbohydrate.
When nutritionists first advised us to replace some of the fats
in our diets with complex carbohydrates, what they had in mind
was beans, fruits, leafy green vegetables and whole grains.
What we loaded up on was pasta, white rice and French fries.
Technically, we were following the rules, but by focusing on
these highly processed or refined foods, we were missing out
on a lot of antioxidants and other important nutrients. And
we found out, much to the detriment of our waistlines, that
it's a whole lot easier to overeat pasta, rice and potatoes
than apples and broccoli.
O.K.,
so maybe the experts were a little naive about human nature.
But no one anticipated the enthusiasm with which the food industry
would jump on the low-fat bandwagon. Alas, it mostly just replaced
the fat with refined foods and sugars and left consumers with
the impression that they could eat as much of this stuff as
they wanted. As if that weren't bad enough, it is becoming increasingly
clear that some folks respond to highly refined foods differently
than the rest of the population. All carbohydrates get broken
down in the body into a simple sugar called glucose. This is
a good thing, since glucose is the principal fuel that powers
our bodies and brains. But about a quarter of American adults—some
50 million men and women—have trouble regulating their
glucose levels. The hallmarks of this condition, which nutritionists
now call metabolic syndrome, include a big waist (40 in. or
more for men; 35 in. or more for women), high blood pressure
(more than 130/85 mm Hg), a predisposition toward diabetes and
troubling cholesterol levels in the blood.
Doctors
aren't quite sure exactly why the body sometimes reacts this
way, though they know that metabolic syndrome is exacerbated
by a sedentary lifestyle. Hence their No. 1 recommendation for
patients with metabolic syndrome is to get more exercise and
build muscle mass. But they also now advise them to replace
at least some of the refined carbohydrates in their diets with
healthy fats, like those in nuts and olive oil. In 2000 the
American Heart Association, which has long touted the advantages
of a low-fat lifestyle, added an exception to its guidelines
for folks with this condition.
None
of this means you should avoid eating fruits and vegetables.
(In their natural form, they are not highly refined.) Just make
sure that they are as colorful as possible—in order to
get a wide variety of nutrients and those ever important antioxidants.
Using spinach instead of iceberg lettuce in a salad, for example,
will double the dietary fiber consumed, more than quadruple
the calcium and potassium, more than triple the folate and provide
seven times as much vitamin C. If you don't like spinach, try
a more nutritious lettuce like romaine or Boston.
Your goal should be to eat at least five 12-cup servings of
fruits and vegetables a day—and preferably more. (Nine
is divine, according to the latest nutritional research.) Don't
assume that fresh is the only game in town. "Frozen can
be just as good and occasionally better," says Lichtenstein
at Tufts. Because frozen fruits and vegetables are chilled immediately
after being picked, they often contain more nutrients than produce
that has been sitting on the shelf.
Sirloin,
Salmon or Beans?
Protein from any number of sources can be part of a healthy
diet. But figuring out just how much or how little of each to
include can be tricky. We've known for some time that most Americans
need to cut back on their consumption of red meat because of
its high saturated-fat content. But now some health experts
are raising the possibility that eating too much fish—long
a staple of heart-healthy diets—may expose folks to dangerous
levels of mercury and other poisons. That's still being debated.
A study published in August suggests that most of the mercury
found in fish is of a form that is not particularly toxic to
humans. So if your choice is between the third helping of swordfish
that week and a Big Mac, go for the swordfish.
Overall,
how much protein do you need? Given the popularity of high-protein
diets, you may be surprised to learn that there hasn't been
much research on the long-term health benefits and risks of
eating lots of protein, though there is concern that too much
protein can lead to kidney and liver problems. Scientists have
calculated the minimum amount needed to keep your muscles from
breaking down—just under 70 grams, or about 212 oz., a
day for someone who weighs 150 lbs. (Food is so plentiful that
Americans rarely develop protein deficiencies.) Whether high
levels of protein are linked to an increased risk of developing
cancer or heart disease remains unclear. What is known is that
too much protein of any kind can leach calcium out of your body
and that eating lots of animal protein usually means you're
increasing your intake of saturated fat as well. "I don't
believe any nutritionist would argue that 30% protein isn't
a reasonable upper limit for long-term safety," says Roberts
at Tufts. But what is safe and what is ideal are two different
matters. Current federal guidelines suggest that adults get
10% to 15% of their daily calories from protein.
If
you're like most people, what interests you about high-protein
diets is the possibility that they might make it easier to slim
down. Preliminary evidence suggests this may be the case over
the short run, but in many ways, that is almost beside the point.
"People forget they should be eating a nutritious, healthy
diet for other reasons," says Barbara Rolls, professor
of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University. "They go
on these kooky weight-management fad diets, and they lose all
sight of bone and cardiovascular health." So remember,
a little protein goes a long way. Your muscles will not fall
apart if you don't eat protein at every meal. Stick with leaner
cuts of meat and give preference to beans, fish, chicken or
pork over red meat.
The
basic rules for eating smarter couldn't be simpler. Watch your
total calorie intake. Burn off as many calories as you take
in. And be choosy about the foods you eat—not just for
a couple of weeks or months but for the rest of your life. "It
takes work," says Dr. John Swartzberg, who chairs the editorial
board of the U.C. Berkeley Wellness Letter. "We live in
a fast-food world." The sooner we accept that that is not
the healthiest of environments for us, the better off we'll
be.
So,
what's for dinner? —
Credits:
Reported by David Bjerklie and Amanda Bower/New York, Laura
Locke/San Francisco, Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Frank Sikora/Birmingham
and Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas
From the Oct. 20, 2003 issue of TIME
magazine
|
