Don't let your diet defeat your vitamin program

(Part III – “Big things come in small packages – vitamins”)

It is a mistake to think that vitamin supplements, or any other kind of nutrients that come in pills, can fully compensate for a diet and lifestyle that incorporate poor health habits. But, your diet has to be the foundation of your optimal health plan.

An optimal diet should emphasize a wide variety of vegetarian food, and should go easy on the sugar, fat, and salt. Eating this type of diet seems to be an elusive goal for many of us. We delight in fried food, like lechon and kare-kare, plus rice cakes soaked in coconut milk (‘gata’), thick steaks, and sweet desserts. Of course, there is nothing wrong with indulging our taste buds within moderation. Consistent overindulgence is what seems to lead our diets astray.

Sweet tooth or fat tooth?

Complex carbohydrates should make up the major part of a healthy diet because of the vitamins, minerals, fiber and other food factors that usually accompany them in food. When you eat complex carbohydrates, these chains, known as polysaccharides, are quickly broken down into sugar in the digestive tract. The true benefits of complex carbohydrates are the company they keep when you eat food such as legumes (beans, lentils), grains, vegetables, and cereals.

Obesity is a major health problem, and has been linked to causing or worsening a long list of illnesses from diabetes to cancer to heart disease. If you are looking for optimal health from vitamins, keeping your weight down by avoiding overindulgence in sugary and fatty-foods should be a basic component of your health program.

It is usually sugar’s combination with fat in food that causes many people to lose control of their appetites and eat too much. As Adam Drewnowski, PhD, head of the Human Nutrition Department of the University of Michigan puts it, “While you may think that it is the sweet taste of candy bars, cookies, cakes, pies, and donuts that tempts you into stuffing yourself, it is the fat, or the combination of sugar and fat, that is so alluring to the taste buds and makes you overindulge.”

High fructose means trouble

It is also a good idea to stay away from soft-drinks altogether, since the sugar in soft drinks is in the form of high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup contains much more fructose than other sweeteners. Because this corn by-product is so economical compared to other sweeteners, food companies have been increasing their use of high-fructose corn syrup in packaged foods. This food additive can raise your serum cholesterol (the cholesterol in your blood) when it is consumed with a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol.

In the human digestive tract, fructose takes a fairly long time to be digested compared to other sugars and starches (starches are chains of simple sugars). Check food labels and limit your consumption of food that list high-fructose corn syrup or fructose among their prime ingredients. Be especially careful to limit the amount of soda you drink, since soft drinks are a prime source of this additive.

Isn’t food like honey, molasses, and brown sugar more natural and better for you than other forms of sugar, such as highly refined white sugar? There is no scientific evidence to support the idea that any form of sugar is better for the human body than any other. Don’t believe that brown sugar is a less refined food than white sugar either. In many cases, the brown sugar you consume is merely white sugar with a coloring (such as caramel) added to give it a dark color.

Does drinking diet-soda flavored with aspartame convey any health benefits? Aspartame has been marketed as part of a “healthy lifestyle,” like Nutra Sweet or Equal. No health benefits have been scientifically linked to this sweetener. Drinking soft drinks flavored with aspartame, or eating food that use aspartame instead of sugar, is no guarantee that you will shed or keep off unwanted pounds.

Watch the fat

Even though many nutrition-minded people consider fat to be as much of a dietary villain as sugar, you would not live very long on a totally fat-free diet. Your body needs fat to make hormones. Ounce for ounce, fat of any kind is the most fattening nutrient that you can eat. By weight, it has more than twice the number of calories of protein or carbohydrate. Fat has some special physiological tricks of its own that make it dangerous to your waistline. Our meals today contain a third more fat than they did back in the horse and carriage days. Also, our food is so much more thoroughly processed and refined. You can see why the food we eat are probably contributing to the rise in the rates of heart disease and cancer.

However, fish oil with its Omega 3 fatty acids found primarily in fish can cut your risk of heart disease. In 1940, British doctor, Hugh Sinclair observed that Eskimos who eat tremendous animal fats from fish, seals and whales, had a remarkably low incidence of cardiovascular disease even if they ate no fruits or vegetables.

You can chow down on a lot more high-carbohydrate food than fatty food without risking obesity. When you eat 100 calories of fat-rich food, you end up with about 95 percent of those calories actually becoming body fat, but 100 calories of carbohydrates only results in 75 calories becoming body fat.

The extra fat on your body creates an internal environment conducive to conditions like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The reason that fat is so alluring to the palate is due to its rate-enhancing abilities, and the feeling of fullness it produces at the end of a meal or snack. When spices are in food, fat helps release their flavors. Without fat, many food taste dull and unrewarding.

Cut back on fat

Fat is necessary for bodily functions and the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, so you shouldn’t cut it out entirely. In the eyes of some experts, the main emphasis for most of us has to be on cutting back on fat. We Filipinos are too hooked on chicharon, leche flan, lumpiang prito, pata, and mayonnaise, which are virtually all fat. They might advocate 20 percent level of fat in the diet.

Vegetables have another dietary advantage. What little fat they contain is composed of unsaturated fats that are generally better for you than the saturated fats in meats and other animal products. All fats are complex mixtures of substances known as fatty acids, the basic building blocks of fat. It has been estimated that about a third of our saturated fat is eaten in the form of food such as burgers, steaks, ham, etc. The next largest source of saturated fat consumed in the United States comes from whole milk and whole milk products. If you want to avoid the butterfat in milk, you should drink skim milk, which has almost no fat, and eat non-fat yogurt and cheeses.

Population studies comparing dietary fat eaten by humans note that while the rate of breast cancer is very low among Japanese women who live in Japan, when Japanese natives move to the United States and begin to consume an American-style high fat diet, their breast cancer rate soon climbs to the usual American rate. Population studies also demonstrate that colon cancer rates vary with the amount of dietary fat that people eat. For example, Seventh Day Adventists, who eat a strictly vegetarian diet, have a lower rate of this disease than Americans, who eat a diet high in animal fat.

Protein - the nutritional ‘good guy’

While fat has long been put down in the popular press as nutritional villain, protein has enjoyed the reputation as a nutritional “good guy.” Just as fats are made up of fatty acids, protein consists of chemicals called amino acids. Your body deconstructs the protein into their constituent chains of amino acids, and reconstructs them into your body infrastructure including your muscles, skin, kidneys, liver, and other organs and tissues. These amino acids also form the building blocks for hormones, enzymes, and blood cells.

Unlike vitamins, most of which we have to consume in our diet and supplements since our bodies can’t make them, the body can manufacture all but eight of the amino acids, called essential amino acids. The protein factories that keep all life on earth supplied with amino acids are plants. All animals either get their organic material to make their proteins from plants or from other animals.

Though plants are the original source of protein, the protein in vegetarian foods is considered incomplete. You have to eat a variety of vegetarian foods to get complete protein. Protein foods that together supply all the essential amino acids are natural match-ups. For instance, if you eat a complete animal protein such as skim milk or cheese with cereal or grain, you have formed a meal that supplies the proper proportion of amino acids.

Vitamins, diet and lifestyle

The latest figure that measures our food intake shows that many of us eat hardly any fruits and vegetables at all, that we overindulge on fast-foods, and when we do eat salads and vegetables, we choose items that don’t supply very much of the carotenes, vitamin C, fiber, and other vitamins. The more nutritious food that should be the centerpiece of a vegetarian diet would include legumes, peppers, carrots, and root crops, bitter gourd (ampalaya) and radish.