Fruit, Vegetables and Health

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As a teen, most of us don’t even care if we’re eating right, or begin to understand the implications of poor eating habits. As we age, however, we do begin to notice the effects of improper exercise, poor eating habits, and how they affect our health. Today, as the baby boomers begin their retirement years, health concerns and questions are on the rise. These aging boomers are more concerned than any previous generations about their good health, their ability to keep their good health, and how their diet affects their health.

The easiest place to affect our health is through our eating habits; in fact it’s the most effective solution to better health, sharing the spotlight with exercise. What about our food intake? What choices do we have to make eating a healthier occurrence?

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Fruits and vegetables are a great place to start. There are so many choices in the filed of fruits and vegetables, that being picky isn’t even a consideration here. It does not matter where your location, the time of the year, or the method of preparation, there are fruits and vegetables to suit the most discriminating taste.

The choices in fruits and vegetables run the gamut in color preference, leafy versus compact, fresh and raw, or freshly picked and cooked. There are fruits and vegetables high in flavor-noids, anti-oxidants, or just plain high in flavor.

What about as a snack? Do fruits and vegetables meet the snack requirement for taste? We already know that they’re good for us, but if we’re going to snack, we want something that tastes really good.

There are fruits and vegetables that fill that bill, quite successfully. What about celery? Celery with pimento or peanut butter is quite delicious. Or, you have the broccoli and cauliflower combination with ranch dip. That’s a snack that any other snack would be hard pressed to surpass. In the fruit section, you have so many snack choices it would require you to spend hours debating which one is best. Apples, oranges, mangoes, bananas, peaches and pears, and this just begins the list.

One of a southerner’s favorite snacks would be baked sweet potato. Now, this is normally consumed with large amounts of butter, but doesn’t have to be, in order to be good. The baked sweet potato can simply be peeled and eaten straight from the oven and it’s still delicious. Back in the fruit section, you still haven’t covered plums, grapes, raisins, watermelons, cantaloupes, or honey dew. My, my, I didn’t realize there were so many.

We haven’t even discussed fruit options that would require us to cook. These are just the fresh and raw options available, most year round. By the time you run the gamut with these ideas, you should be ready to start all over at the beginning.

You should have enough options now for snacking, that healthful snacking can become a standard, not an exception for you. These ideas do not by any means encompass all options; these are just simply the most popular local favorites if you live in the South and in Alabama.

 

Calcium and Eating Healthy

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Did you understand the importance of calcium in your diet before the widespread news of the effects of too little calcium was published? Probably not. Chances are you still don’t fully understand the effect of calcium on your digestive processes and the functioning of your heart.

Calcium is one of the essential elements that must be present during the metabolism of our food, and during the beating of your heart. Calcium deficiencies in these two areas are what helps lead to heart disease and osteoporosis. When you don’t take enough calcium in through your daily intake of food and vitamins, your body will draw on the calcium reserves in your bones in order to have enough to maintain body processes. This is why women, who are older, often develop osteoporosis, and don’t even begin to realize they are at risk. When the amount of calcium in your blood drops to a low level, the body will draw calcium out of the bones. This causes your bones to become more porous and brittle. This explains the rise in broken hips in older people, especially women.

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In order to absorb calcium into our bones, we need the presence of estrogen and exercise. Both of these are in short supply during our later years, chiefly because your body doesn’t produce estrogen after menopause, and as we age, we lose the ability to exercise. Vitamin D is a backup to the estrogen and exercise problem, however, because Vitamin D does continue to help our body absorb Calcium. Hence, we have the addition of Calcium to milk, naturally high in Vitamin D.

If you have determined that you need supplemental Calcium, there are certain forms of calcium that are more easily digested. The best absorbed form of calcium comes in a pill in the form of calcium salt like carbonate or phosphate.

There is a further warning to some forms of calcium that are available on the market today Both the bone meal calcium and dolomite calcium have been found to contain toxic metals such as arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium. One additional piece of advice, if you’ve heard that antacids contain calcium that you can use as a supplement instead of vitamins, the information is correct. However, you’d have to take a handful of antacids and quite often they contain substances that disrupt the digestive process. The best advice to date is to purchase a good calcium carbonate or phosphate as a vitamin supplement and establish a regular habit of taking them first thing in the morning with breakfast.

If you have heart, kidney, liver disease, or high blood pressure, you should consult a physician before taking calcium supplements as the medicine you’re already taking may contain a built in supplement, or may cause a reaction when combined with calcium.

The recommended daily dosage for children is 800 milligrams of calcium each day. This level is fairly accurate for women until they reach the post-menopausal age and the level of estrogen production is reduced or eliminated. At that point, calcium intake should reach a level of 1500 milligrams per day; almost double that of pre-menopausal women.

The ABC’s of Eating

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The ABC’s of Eating would be a great title for an education course that addresses all of the food groups, the benefits and detriments of those groups and how to ascertain what our individual needs are from each category.

That doesn’t seem like such a difficult concept, but do you see any class being taught that addresses those issues? No, and more than likely you won’t. Because our society doesn’t feel like it is an issue that should be addressed by our education system.

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Let me put this proposition before you, however. Has there always been an evident need to learn to drive? No, driving wasn’t around until the turn of the 20th century. Driving is included in the education system, and taught as a matter of course each year. The need to be educated in the ability to drive is relatively new, and is not one of the “old world” school topics, but it’s included because a need developed.

Education about our eating is a need that has developed over the last 30 years, and has now reached epidemic portions. Advertisements about our eating choices are driven by the need to make a profit. The commercials our children are watching have nothing to do with their real nutritional needs, or the foods that actually are good for them to consume. Here is where the educational process should bridge the gap. Just as our education system teaches our children how to count, read, and write, they should teach them about their eating habits. We educate our children because knowledge is power. It provides them with the power they need to make good decisions, acquire jobs, create new products and processes, and to live out their lives as they see fit. Shouldn’t they also have a basic knowledge of how to utilize the food resources around them?

Teaching and educating about the basics of the food groups, how they work with your body, the metabolic process of digesting those foods, how the body uses and stores energy, and how to keep all those processes working at optimal levels is as important as understanding the algebraic theorems and how they apply to our ability to perform mathematically. Determining just where in the education realm that such a class would fit is another matter. Members of the educational system will probably tell you that it simply isn’t a matter of concern for the school system, that it is an issue best addressed at home. But how can it be addressed at home, if the person at home has no knowledge to impart? We don’t just acquire the knowledge needed for intelligent food consumption with the birth of our children.

The basic food groups and what foods fall into each category is a topic lightly addressed during the health classes taught at our middle schools. But what about the metabolic process of digesting those foods, the interaction of the food, the nutrients, and our energy needs? Knowing how to differentiate between what foods will provide both energy, nutrients, and good taste is a learned knowledge. Do you suppose children would continue to stuff something in their mouth if we addressed the consumption of Twinkies in the same way we do dirt?