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Nutrition for life
Advice on a healthy balanced diet and the benefits of Omega 3.
This article was published by Healthspan.
By the time a small toddler is taking his or her first tentative steps with mother around the supermarket, the taste for foods is already set. Babies when they are weaned should have been subjected to as many tastes and textures as are possible between the sixth and tenth month. Omega 3 doesn´t only stop us developing disease in our hearts and arteries, but also nourishes the brain especially in childhood.
If they have been fed only on sweetened fruit juices, milk or tasteless, bland pasta, toddlers may well become food refusers as small children and addicted to a typical British diet when older. This is even worse than the average American diet and is, when compared to a typical Greek one, only half as nutritious.
Jamie Oliver has transferred his revolutionary zeal from the high life of Montes, the many-starred restaurant in London’s West End, to the tougher life of school dinners on a housing estate. His research showed that not only did Jamie’s new clientele of pupils have a taste in food that would shock their grandparents, doctors and the Institute of Food Research, but they preferred it. When asked to swap turkey twizzlers and chicken nuggets for a more healthy, simple and high cuisine option, they were disgusted, spat it out and looked for the twizzlers. If only they had had a wider choice of tastes and textures in infancy, they might now be wolfing down the peppers, sweetcorn, beans, peas and spaghetti bolognese and might even be tempted by leeks and broccoli if not brussels sprouts.
Household menus should be part of a traditionally balanced diet with a mixture of protein, carbohydrate and fat. Few foods are in themselves ‘bad’. However an excess of only one type at the
expense of the rest of the basic diet is undesirable. The diet should also be rich in trace elements and
vitamins. The vitamin content of foods is falling because in many instances modern marketing and
travel result in it being less fresh by the time it has reached the supermarket shelves hundreds
of miles from where it was grown. Research has shown that this delay can cause the vitamin content to have drooped as seriously as a tired lettuce leaf.
One of the features of a well balanced diet is that the proportion of calories taken as fat is under
30 per cent. Only a third of this should be as saturated fat, such as is found in butter, margarine or fat around a steak. Carbohydrates should contribute around 55 per cent of the calories, but not all are
equally desirable. They can now be divided and described according to their glycaemic index. The higher the index, the faster they are absorbed from the gut into the metabolic system. Carbohydrates
with a low glycaemic index are nutritionally the best. As much of the carbohydrate as possible should be as complex, coarse polysaccharides. Wholemeal bread, with a low glycaemic index, is
therefore to be preferred to highly refined bread or sugary sweets.
Protein can either be vegetable, such as is found in beans and peas, or animal protein. The more mixed the diet, the better. As well as carbohydrates being of varying value according to their glycaemic index, so are some fats better than others – certain ones being essential. The omega 3 essential fatty acids found in oily fish have a special role in maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system. It is the correct balance between the essential fatty acid omega 3 from fish and the essential fatty acid omega 6, found in many vegetable oils, seeds, nuts, as well as in smaller quantities in eggs, beef and liver, that has such a beneficial effect in reducing the amount of heart disease in those who eat fish regularly. It is relatively easy to have enough omega 6: the difficulty is to keep up the intake of omega 3. It is recommended that people should have at least two meals weekly of oily fish. Among the best to choose are anchovies, salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel, fresh tuna (not tinned) and trout. Speaking for myself, I can manage two fish meals weekly easily, and with pleasure, unless I am travelling. When on the move, to compensate for a lack of herrings for breakfast, I take at least one capsule of fish oil daily. Omega 3 doesn’t only stop us developing disease in our hearts and arteries, but also nourishes the brain, especially in childhood. If mothers have oily fish while pregnant, their children have an advantage when they start school; this advantage is still apparent up to primary age and probably for longer.
As well as the approved amounts of fat, carbohydrate and protein, we also need to take fibre
and the essential vitamins and trace elements. These are found in fruit and vegetables. We need five
different portions of fruit and vegetables a day, not including potatoes. Only two of these portions should be of the same type: we can’t get away with having five glasses of orange juice daily for that would lack fibre. In diet, variety is not only the spice of life, it may even be the means of preserving life.
The good news is that the vegetables don’t have to be the cabbage, brussels sprouts and broccoli of our childhood. We can equally well reach our five portions a day by having canned, juiced, frozen and dried fruits and vegetables. The portions don’t have to be very large. A glass of fruit juice (not a fruit drink or squash that may not have much fruit in it) can count as one, or at most two a day. Two handfuls of raspberries would be a portion, as would half a pepper, three tablespoonfuls of sweetcorn, or three dried apricots. A bowl of mixed salad is one portion, but the emphasis is on the mixed. Pure lettuce is not much use to health by itself. It is the other vegetables, fruits and nuts in the salad that matter, for it is the tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, radishes and onions that provide the nutritional content of a salad. I also always recommend a daily multivitamin to maintain vitamin trace element levels and health.
Article issued: 11 July 2005
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