Last night after a work out with my new trainer Eugene, I came home to meet the Manfriend. He and I were snacking on a couple of peanuts and discussing what to do for the evening. Now, for the time being, we are both trying to watch our carb intake - we both agree that carb-overload is a big part of why we are not as slim as we have been in the past. Anyway... In checking out the back of the peanut container, we saw that one serving of peanuts has 5g carbs, which is said to be only 2% of the recommended daily carb intake for a person (based on a 2,000 cal diet). That's 250g of carbs in a day. Does this seem like a lot of carbs to anyone else?
With most Americans getting their carbs in the form of processed and refined carbs (convenience-carbs, as I like to call them), we are missing the point. The Livestrong website has an article about America's obsession with a low fat diet. Stated simply, we've traded any and all fats for anything low fat. Carbs do have lower calories per gram than fats, but not all carbs and fats are the same.
I happened to be home resting up for the Monument Avenue 10K two weekends ago on a Friday night and caught Jamie Oliver's new show Food Revolution on ABC (watch full episodes!).
(photo courtesy fooducate.com) I was ready for another noisy chef barking out orders to lazy restauranteurs, but it turned out to be quite eye-opening. In short, Jamie visits what has been labeled "America's Fattest City" - Huntington, WV. He has a plan to teach the town everything they need to know about making healthy food choices. And he starts at the schools. In the clip Vegetable Moment (sorry I couldn't embed the video) he is scolded by the school district's person in charge of school lunches, who is obligated to follow national guidelines on nutrition in order for the schools to receive federal funding for their lunch programs. I highly recommend watching the video. They get into a disagreement on what is and is not "healthy" and let's just say the French fries win. Scary.
My main concern here is, no one is teaching these kids the difference between "good" and "bad" carbs. We are raising another generation of people destined for obesity, heart disease, diabetes and even cancer. We need a nutritional overhaul from the top down!
So the question is: Who is setting these nutritional guidelines and why do American's feel obligated to blindly follow?
christopher sent me this comment via Google Buzz, for any of you interested in further reading:
ReplyDeletechristopher mcconnell - You should read the book..."In the defense of food"....it is awesome and talks a lot about the nutritional guidelines that have been set up and how bogus they can be. And you should also check out the paleo thinking on nutrition, www.livingpaleo.com and some other websites will come up if you google it; it is an interesting diet that makes a lot of sense. It is kind of a challenge to keep, but overall is extremely healthy.
my response: i haven't read all of IDF yet, but it's on my list. i've heard him speak a few times and i like what he's doing. also, that Paleo diet looks very interesting - similar to a few of the whole foodie diets out there. i like the concept, keep it simple to obtain the best results for health and weight and mental stability. i think i will address this in another post, but all those process foods and their crazy chemicals cannot be doing good things to our brains either. i have a theory about food dyes that i'll share another time. that's a whole different rant. :-)
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