It is the purpose of this article to present some easily digestible common sense (yay for puns!) on the basics of nutrition. Hopefully you’ll take away a few valuable insights, and finish the article with the inspiration to learn more, because there’s a whole heck of a lot to know, and a well-informed consumer will always make better decisions.
You are what you eat. The various foodstuffs you break down during a given day literally incorporate themselves into the functioning whole of your body. If you eat crap, you will become crap. “Crap,” of course, is a highly technical term for empty calories, but we’ll get into all of that later.
Coming to understand any idea as broad and far reaching as nutrition takes a heap of mental chewing. That is to say, there are many little ideas that need to be processed and absorbed before one can even begin to take on the bigger ideas.
Think about the big idea of “nutrition” as a kind of jigsaw puzzle. It’s impossible to know how any of the individual pieces (or little ideas) fit in relation to one another before making lots of tedious little connections. Eventually, these little connections come together and form larger networks, which in turn connect to make up the bare frame of the puzzle (or big idea) as a whole. While you certainly don’t need every piece in its rightful place to understand the picture as a whole, more pieces will always give rise to a clearer, more complete picture of the puzzle.
Furthering this puzzle analogy, as our conception of a big idea grows and becomes more organized, all the little ideas thrown our way can be sorted out and easily incorporated into the whole. In other words, the more you know, the easier it is to learn. Conversely, if you know nothing, starting to learn can be quite a disorienting challenge. Regardless, the beginning is always a good place to start, and we can work our way up from there.
At its most basic level, food is energy. Our bodies need energy in order to continue metabolizing, where metabolism is defined as the sum total of chemical reactions taking place in our body. In other words, metabolism comprehensively describes everything we are (biologically speaking).
The potential chemical energy stored in food is measured in calories, where a single calorie is the heat energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade. Different foods can be made up of vastly different component parts, but they’re the same as far as they all hold energy, and this energy. This heat, while still inside the food, is measured in calories.
Digestion, the process of breaking food down into its fundamental parts, is itself an energy expensive process. The reason your mom always told you to wait an hour after eating before you could jump in the pool is because your gastrointestinal tract is sucking up so much blood and energy that your muscles would cramp up if put under any strenuous exercise, and you could drown. Also, after eating a big meal, everyone feels drowsy because there’s less blood available for the brain.
On an average day for the average person, about 2,000 calories of potential chemical energy are metabolized into heat, and then made use of in some way by our bodies. If a person who metabolizes 2,000 calories consumes more than 2,000 calories worth of food, a large portion of that excess energy will be stored as either fat or muscle. Conversely, a person who consumes less than 2,000 calories will cannibalize pre-existing fat and muscle from their bodies in order to meet the physical demands of their metabolism.
Truth be told, I’m oversimplifying. Not all calories are created equal. The way that our bodies are able to break food down into cellularly useful parts depends on the nature of the calories ingested. Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of calories – carbohydrates, fats or proteins – and all three are needed for our incredibly complex machines to function properly.
Here are a couple of simple examples of the way calories affect the way our bodies may use them:
Splenda, the zero-calorie sweetener, actually does have calories stored within it. However, because our bodies cannot break down Splenda into usable parts, for all practical purposes, Spelnda has no calories, and it still tastes good.
The energy found in carbohydrates goes from the stomach to hungry cells much faster than proteins or fats, but cannot provide the same sustained energy as is found in proteins or fats.
Next week, I’ll dive deeper into the mechanics of nutrition and better explain the eccentricities of each of the three families of food.
In the mean time, start looking more closely at the nutritional information of the food you eat. Beyond the number of calories, look at where the calories come from and what your food is made out of. Take a moment to consider the phrase, “You are what you eat,” and then ask yourself who you want to be.
Keven O’Toole is a junior philosophy major and can be reached at [email protected].
