“You are what you eat”, goes a famous saying. If that’s truly the case, then a lot of Americans would appear to be unhealthy, chemically treated, commercially raised slabs of animal flesh. While that is not a particularly pleasant thought, it is nonetheless a description of the typical American omnivore who survives on the consumption of big macs and greasy french fries. It’s true, and what have the average Americans done about this problem? Asked for seconds and tell themselves that they won’t eat much for tomorrow’s meal. You already know what you should be doing, exercise for at least 20 minutes every second day, eat the correct foods and avoid dangerous substances: smoke and other poisons, toxins and cancer-causing chemicals.
You need a high level of anti-oxidants to live a long healthy life in our modern world. If you’re healthy and eat a well-balanced diet based on the Food Guide Pyramid, most Nutrition Essayist agree that supplements are unnecessary. A well balanced diet supplies not only the recommended daily allowances (RDAs) of all the necessary nutrients, but also important non nutrients that vitamin pills lack. Fiber is one of these nutrients. Nutritionists also believes that taking supplements perpetuates bad eating habits by making you think everything will be okay as long as you get your “vities”. I totally agree that if you eat a nutritional meal then why take any dietary supplements or vitamins.
But lets be honest with ourselves. Who honestly consumes their daily allotted nutrients each day out of their meals? I bet you’re saying to yourself, well sure I do, because I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and have a glass of milk and gram crackers for a late night snack. Hey, I even get out of my chair at nights to try to find the remote, I’m healthy enough. I would be willing to put money on it, that you not reaching your daily benefits, because only 9% of adults eat a balanced diet. Many people can’t or don’t even eat some meals during the day due to busy schedules. But it’s been said that you do your body more harm eating one or two big meals a day then eating four or five little ones.
Even people who eat right don’t get large enough amounts of antioxidant vitamins which have proven effective in preventing diseases. The typical American diet is well below what it should be. A study by the National Food Consumption Survey report only 3% of the population ate the recommended number of servings from the four food groups. Only 12% consumed 100% of the RDA for all of the top nutrients like protein, calcium and vitamin A, B, and C. Over 70% of men and over 80% of women failed to get even 2/3’s of the RDA for one or more nutrients. Diets in high school students were found to be inadequate as they only consumed 56% of their calories from the Basic Four Food Groups.
Foods most frequently eaten are cakes, candy, soda pop, butter, and jellies and jams. So what are the people to do about this bottomed out problem. Are we suppose to turn into nutrition freaks or do we forget it and live our drained out lives depressed, out of money, stress out, and tired. While it seems that everyone from grandmothers to government has good advice about how to eat well, The American DieteticAssociation is urging people to take charge of their own nutrition destiny. ADA shows that when it comes to nutrition, there is no such thing as a“one-size-fits-all” approach.
Nutrition experts say achieving good nutrition is like putting together a puzzle, only you know where the pieces fit. So what is good nutrition. We know that you can get a good nutrition from a balanced meal, but know that most Americans don’t get that kind of nutrition that is needed. So should we be heading towards something new like dietary supplements’some nutritionist say that we shouldn’t while I say that if were not getting enough nutrition out of our meals, then lets do something about it and put our bodies in better shape. We could save money in the long run.
I know for sure we can better ourselves with nutritional values that we can’t get out of our meals. Two ways come to my mind with thinking about nutrition values, dietary supplements and multivitamins. When it comes to supplements, it’s a brand new world out there. In fact, supplement technology has come so far in the past five years that.
