From: Gary Barnes, President of WellnessMax, Inc.
May 19,2006
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In response to recent questions the CWC has received about nutrition as well as requests for us to investigate food myths, I began this series last month with an article on awareness. This month, I’m taking it a step further with a discussion about the labels on packaged food and the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA). The logic being, if you understand the RDA standards and know how to read the nutrition labels on food, you can make some decisions on your own. But first a digression—there are lots of foods that are good for us and many that are not good for us. For example, a friend of mine ate carrots for breakfast lunch and dinner. His thinking was that carrots were good for him and he could not go wrong by eating them. One day he landed in the ER because he had poisoned himself by eating too many carrots. This falls into the context of too much of a good thing. Likewise we can eat foods that are ''bad'' for us once in a while or in moderation. The idea is to keep things in balance and count calories. If you eat that bacon cheeseburger you will need to balance it out with some lower fat foods—maybe a couple of carrots. Understanding the FDA’s RDA’s will help you know how to be aware and how to balance your nutritional intake. For instance, the RDA guidelines suggest that less than 30% of the total calories you consume daily should come from fat. Remember there are four types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and trans fats. The daily recommendation for protein is .8 grams per kilogram of body weight. So if you weigh 154 pounds, divide 154 by 2.2 lbs/kg, and multiply by .8. You will see that you need 56 kg of protein for the day. There are about 7 grams of protein in 1 ounce of cheese, beef, fish, or poultry; 1 cup of milk; 1 egg; 1 tablespoon of peanut butter; or one-half cup of legumes. So, if you incorporate eight of these into your meals and snacks each day, you will get your recommended daily intake of protein. For the person who asked how much sodium is too much, there is no RDA for sodium. The adequate intake (AI) for most healthy adults is 1500 mg, meaning your body only requires 1500 mg daily. To illustrate, consider that there are 180 mg of sodium in 15 potato chips. Now take a look at the Nutritional Facts label on the side of a sports drink. An eight-ounce serving of the drink contains 110 mg of sodium. The container I checked had 24 ounces in it, so that would be 330 mg of sodium. That and a small bag of chips would cover about one-third of your sodium needs for the day. The USDA's Dietary Guidelines recommend that you should consume no more than 2300 mg of sodium each day, which is equal to about 1 teaspoon of salt. This is called the Upper Limit (UL) for sodium. In healthy adults without hypertension, a maximum of 2300 mg of sodium daily is considered safe to consume with no adverse health effects. But wait there is more! If the AI for sodium is 1500 mg and an eight-ounce serving of sports drink contains 110 mg that would mean drinking eight-ounces would be equal to about 7% of your AI of sodium. Why then does the label on the side of the bottle equate this to only 5%? If you are as old as I am, you will remember this was the point in the show where Mr. Wizard gave us a big smile and told us why 7% means 5%—because of the difference between AI and UL allowed. Thus, the food label does not calculate the percent of AI, but the percent of the allowed UL of sodium (%DV) as it relates to a 2,000 calorie diet. All of this makes sense until you discover that trans fat, sugars and protein don’t have a %DV on the Nutritional Facts label. Apparently the experts cannot provide a reference value for these nutrients to establish a %DV value. So if you are trying to make things add up to 100%, don’t bother. The point is that certain kinds of fats either contribute to good cholesterol (HDL), bad cholesterol (LDL), or both when consumed by the body; and LDL is not good for you. So here is where you will have to refer back to the dietary guideline that states less than 30% of total calories should come from fat. Thirty percent of 2,000 is 600 calories. Got it? To become more aware of what you are eating, start keeping track of the nutritional information on the labels. Once you start, you will be too tired to snack. At WellnessMax we use a computer program that breaks down the nutritional value for entire meals and prints out an easy to understand report. For those of you without such a program, start keeping a diary. You will be amazed at what you are eating. |
