Station 1
Carbohydrates
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The carbohydrate food group is one of three sources of nutrients and energy necessary for human survival. If you have seen the food pyramid, you will notice that there is no specific label for carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are composed of a diverse group of foods, including grains, fruits, milk and vegetables.
Factoid: Carbohydrate food molecules are made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The molecules are produced through photosynthesis, in which plants combine carbon dioxide, water, and light energy into a compound with a 1:2:1 carbon-hydrogen-oxygen ratio. To use the energy, our digestive system needs to break down, or metabolize, the carbohydrate. Each gram of carbohydrate has four calories (a unit of food energy). While this is fewer than the nine calories from a gram of fat, many people believe that carbohydrates are energy-rich and thus contribute to weight gain.
However, low-carbohydrate diets can be dangerous. Without a proper intake of carbs, the body resorts to breaking down fat for energy, in the process releasing substances that will disrupt normal blood acidity.
Instead, about 60 percent of total caloric intake should come from carbohydrates. Many foods contain carbohydrates:
One slice of bread: 15 grams 1/4 bagel: 15 grams
There are two types of carbohydrates, simple and complex. Most of your carbohydrates should come from complex carbohydrates.
Simple Carbohydrates
Simple carbohydrates are composed of single-unit sugars called monosaccharides and disaccharides. Glucose and fructose are examples of common monosaccharides. Simple carbohydrates are easily digested and converted to sugar rapidly in the bloodstream.
This can cause trouble for people with diabetes. If you have diabetes, you should be careful since carbohydrates, especially simple ones can raise blood sugar very quickly. Examples of simple carbohydrates include fruit, honey, juice and candy.
Complex Carbohydrates
Complex carbohydrates (or polysaccharides) are built from single-unit sugars joined in long chains. Two types of complex carbohydrates are particularly important for nutrition:
Starch: Starch is a polysaccharide that plants use to store energy. It is the main constituent of complex carbohydrates in the human diet. Examples of starchy foods include potatoes, rice and pasta.
Dietary Fiber: Dietary fiber is a polysaccharide found in plants as cellulose, pectin, and lignin. Although its rigid bonds are resistant to digestive enzymes, and thus pass through your digestive system intact, fiber from polysaccharides is extremely important in maintaining good health.
Benefits of Fiber
Some benefits of fiber include:
Regulation of blood sugar: fiber slows down the digestion of other foods while it is eaten, and helps prevent large changes in blood sugar.
Lowering of blood cholesterol: fiber binds fatty acids and cholesterol into large clusters that your body can get rid of more easily.
Promotion of intestinal health: fiber aids digestion and helps prevent constipation and hemorrhoids by regulating bowel movements.
Foods rich in fiber include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, oat bran and beans. However, watch out for processed grain products. White bread and white pastas have been processed, or
"refined," so that the grains have been stripped of their fibrous husks. They may be "enriched" or "fortified," but these words are misleading.
The more refined the food, the less fiber it contains. (See Nutritional Effects of Refining and Enrichment on Wheat and Rice to see the effects of refinement.)
Try to eat at least 20 grams of fiber daily. Foods high in fiber include: Cooked split peas, one cup: 16 grams
Boiled red kidney beans, one cup: 13 grams Whole wheat spaghetti, one cup: 6 grams Boiled broccoli, one cup: 5 grams
Station 2
Learning About Fats
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Fat is a component in food. Some foods, including most fruits and vegetables, have almost no fat. Other foods have plenty of fat. They include nuts, oils, butter, and meats like beef.
The name — fat — may make it sound like something you shouldn't eat. But fat is an important part of a healthy diet. And little kids, especially, need a certain amount of fat in their diets so the brain and nervous system develop correctly. That's why toddlers need to drink whole milk, which has more fat, and older kids can drink low-fat or skim milk.
Doing the Math
How much fat should you eat? Experts say kids older than 2 should get about 30% of their daily calories from fat. Here's how that works. Every day, you eat a certain amount of calories. For instance, some kids will eat 2,000 calories in a day. If 30% of 2,000 calories comes from fat, that means that 600 calories will come from fat. You can look at a food label to learn how many grams of fat are in a serving of a food. Labels also list the total calories from fat.
One way to reach this goal is to eat foods that are about 30% fat. But few foods contain exactly 30% fat. Instead, you can eat a mix of foods — some with higher percentages of fat and some with lower percentages — so that you still meet that goal of 30% of calories from fat.
Here's a sample menu to help you reach that goal. It includes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, milk, and an apple. The peanut butter is high in fat, but it's a nutritious food and the overall total from the whole meal is about 30% from fat.
Two slices of bread = 13% fat (30 of 230 calories from fat)
Two tablespoons of peanut butter = 75% fat (140 of 190 calories from fat) One tablespoon of jelly = 0% fat (0 of 50 calories from fat)
One cup of 1% milk = 18 % (20 of 110 calories from fat) Apple = 0% (0 of 80 calories from fat)
Total = 29% fat (190 of 660 calories from fat)
Types of Fat
You might see ads for foods that say they're "low-fat" or "fat-free." Lower-fat diets have been recommended for health and to help people lose weight. But nutrition experts are finding that fats are more complicated and that some kinds of fat are actually good for your health. As a bonus, fat in food helps people feel satisfied, so they don't eat as much.
But that doesn't mean a high-fat diet will be good for you. And some fats are better than others. Here are the three major types:
Unsaturated fats: These are found in plant foods and fish. These may be good for heart health. The best of the unsaturated fats are found in olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil, albacore tuna, and salmon.
Saturated fats: These fats are found in meat and other animal products, such as butter, cheese, and all milk except skim. Saturated fats are also in palm and coconut oils, which are often used in commercial baked goods (the kind you buy at the store). Eating too much saturated fat can raise blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart disease.
Trans fats: These fats are found in margarine, especially the sticks. Trans fats are also found in certain foods that you buy at the store or in a restaurant, such as snack foods, baked goods, and fried foods. When you see "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" oils on an ingredient list, the food contains trans fats. Trans fats are also listed on the food label. Like saturated fats, trans fats can raise cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease.
Why Do We Need Fat?
Dietary fat helps a kid's body grow and develop like it should. Fats fuel the body and help absorb some vitamins. They also are the building blocks of hormones and they insulate nervous system tissue in the body.
Station 3: Cholesterol
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Cholesterol Molecule
Burgers. Bacon. Cheese fries. What do they have in common (besides being some people's idea of delicious)? They're all high in cholesterol.
Cholesterol, a waxy substance produced by the liver and found in certain foods, is needed to make vitamin D and some hormones, build cell walls, and create bile salts that help you digest fat. Actually, your liver produces about 1,000 milligrams of cholesterol a day, enough
cholesterol so that if you never touched another cheese fry, you'd be OK. But it's hard to avoid cholesterol entirely because so many foods contain it.
Too much cholesterol in the body can lead to serious problems like heart disease. Many factors can contribute to high cholesterol, but the good news is there are things you can do to control them.
Lipids are fats that are found throughout the body. Cholesterol, a type of lipid, is found in foods from animal sources. This means that eggs, meats, and whole-fat dairy products (including milk, cheese, and ice cream) are loaded with cholesterol — and vegetables, fruits, and grains contain none.
Besides the 1,000 milligrams of cholesterol that your liver produces each day, you probably consume about 150 to 250 milligrams in the foods you eat.
Because cholesterol can't travel alone through the bloodstream, it has to combine with certain proteins. These proteins act like trucks, picking up the cholesterol and transporting it to different parts of the body. When this happens, the cholesterol and protein form a lipoprotein together.
The two most important types of lipoproteins are high-density lipoproteins (or HDL) and low-density lipoproteins (or LDL). You've probably heard people call LDL cholesterol "bad cholesterol" and HDL cholesterol "good cholesterol" because of their very different effects on the body:
HDL cholesterol removes cholesterol from the blood vessels and carries it back to the liver, where it can be processed and sent out of the body.
Dangers of High Cholesterol
When you have too much cholesterol, it can be dangerous to your health. When LDL cholesterol levels are high, cholesterol is deposited on the walls of arteries and forms a hard substance called plaque. Over time, plaque causes the arteries to become narrower, decreasing blood flow and causing a condition called atherosclerosis (pronounced: ah-thuh-ro-skluh-RO-sis), or hardening of the arteries.
When atherosclerosis affects the coronary arteries (the blood vessels that supply the muscles of the heart), the condition is called coronary artery disease, which puts a person at risk for having a heart attack. When atherosclerosis affects the blood vessels that supply the brain, the condition is called cerebral vascular disease, which puts a person at risk of having a stroke.
Atherosclerosis may also block blood flow to other vital organs, including the kidneys and intestines. This is why it's so important to start paying attention to cholesterol levels as a teen — you can delay or prevent serious health problems in the future.
What Causes High LDL Cholesterol Levels?
Some of the factors that can lead to high cholesterol are:
Overweight: Excess weight has been linked to high cholesterol levels.
Heredity: If cholesterol problems or heart disease run in your family, you are at a higher risk for having problems.
Diet: Remember the saying "you are what you eat"? Avoid foods that are high in cholesterol, saturated fat, and trans fat, all of which increase cholesterol levels and your risk of developing heart disease.
Age: The risk of high cholesterol increases as you get older.
On the other hand, physical activity tends to increase HDL cholesterol levels, which reduces your chance of developing heart disease.
How Can I Lower My Cholesterol?
Some people who have high cholesterol levels need to be on medication as part of their treatment to lower it. Although most teens won't need to take medication to lower their cholesterol, it's still important to keep cholesterol in check because plaque can start to form during the teen years. To see if you have high cholesterol, talk to your doctor, who can test your cholesterol levels by taking a blood sample.
The 2010 Dietary Guidelines recommend that cholesterol intake should be less than 300 milligrams a day, total fat intake should be 25-35% your total calories, saturated fat should be 10% or less of the total daily calories, and trans fats should be kept as low as possible.
Also, maintain a healthy weight and get moving. Regular aerobic exercise — stuff like biking, walking, and swimming — strengthens your heart, lowers cholesterol, and helps you to lose excess weight. For people who smoke, quitting can help decrease the risk of heart disease.
Healthy Tips
Here are some helpful tips you can try:
Eat a diet that contains many low-cholesterol foods: fruits, veggies, whole grains (like breads and cereals), legumes (beans), and fish.
Eat a diet that is low in saturated and trans fat. Replace saturated and trans fats with unsaturated fats. Use liquid vegetable oil or trans fat-free margarine instead of butter,
shortening, or stick margarine. Stay away from products that contain hydrogenated vegetable oils.
If you eat meat, try using lean meats and skinless poultry. Make sure you trim off all noticeable fat before cooking and drain the fat from the pan after browning meats.
Instead of frying, try boiling, broiling, baking, roasting, poaching, steaming, or sautéing.
Instead of whole milk, use low-fat or nonfat milk, which contains all the nutrients without all the fat. Choose other low-fat or nonfat dairy products, including yogurt, cheese, and cottage cheese. You can also substitute low-fat buttermilk or yogurt in recipes that call for cream cheese or sour cream.
Use trans-fat-free margarine.
Instead of meat, use different sources of protein including fish, beans, peas, nuts, and tofu or other soy products.
Instead of eggs, try just egg whites or cholesterol-free commercial egg substitutes.
Skip commercially prepared baked goods, which are often made with hydrogenated oils or trans fats.
Looking for snacks that are low in fat and cholesterol? Try fruits, raw veggies and low-fat dips, low-fat whole-grain crackers, plain unsalted popcorn or pretzels, gelatin, or low-fat yogurt.
Station 4: Protein
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You probably know you need to eat protein, but what is it? Many foods contain protein (say: pro -teen), but the best sources are beef, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, nuts, seeds, and legumes like black beans and lentils.
Protein builds, maintains, and replaces the tissues in your body. (Not the tissues you blow your nose in! We mean the stuff your body's made up of.) Your muscles, your organs, and your immune system are made up mostly of protein.
Your body uses the protein you eat to make lots of specialized protein molecules that have specific jobs. For instance, your body uses protein to make hemoglobin (say: hee-muh-glow-bin), the part of red blood cells that carries oxygen to every part of your body.
Other proteins are used to build cardiac muscle. What's that? Your heart! In fact, whether you're running or just hanging out, protein is doing important work like moving your legs, moving your lungs, and protecting you from disease.
All About Amino Acids
When you eat foods that contain protein, the digestive juices in your stomach and intestine go to work. They break down the protein in food into basic units, called amino acids (say uh-mee-no a -sids). The amino acids then can be reused to make the proteins your body needs to maintain muscles, bones, blood, and body organs.
Proteins are sometimes described as long necklaces with differently shaped beads. Each bead is a small amino acid. These amino acids can join together to make thousands of different proteins. Scientists have found many different amino acids in protein, but 22 of them are very important to human health.
Of those 22 amino acids, your body can make 13 of them without you ever thinking about it. Your body can't make the other nine amino acids, but you can get them by eating protein-rich foods. They are called essential amino acids because it's essential that you get them from the foods you eat.
Different Kinds of Protein
Protein from animal sources, such as meat and milk, is called complete, because it contains all nine of the essential amino acids. Most vegetable protein is considered incomplete because it lacks one or more of the essential amino acids. This can be a concern for someone who doesn't eat meat or milk products. But people who eat a vegetarian diet can still get all their essential amino acids by eating a wide variety of protein-rich vegetable foods.
butter on whole-grain bread you're set. Likewise, red beans won't give you everything you need, but red beans and rice will do the trick.
The good news is that you don't have to eat all the essential amino acids in every meal. As long as you have a variety of protein sources throughout the day, your body will grab what it needs from each meal.
How Much Is Enough?
You can figure out how much protein you need if you know how much you weigh. Each day, kids need to eat about 0.5 grams of protein for every pound (0.5 kilograms) they weigh. That's a gram for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) you weigh. Your protein needs will grow as you get bigger, but then they will level off when you reach adult size. Adults, for instance, need about 60 grams per day.
To figure out your protein needs, multiply your weight in pounds times 0.5 or you can just take your weight and divide by 2. For instance, a 70-pound (or 32-kilogram) kid should have about 35 grams of protein every day. If you only know your weight in kilograms, you need about 1 gram of protein each day for every kilogram you weigh.
You can look at a food label to find out how many protein grams are in a serving. But if you're eating a balanced diet, you don't need to keep track of it. It's pretty easy to get enough protein. Here's an example of how a kid might get about 35 grams of protein in a day:
2 tablespoons (15 milliliters) peanut butter (7 grams protein) 1 cup (240 milliliters) low-fat milk (8 grams protein)
1 ounce (30 grams) or two domino-size pieces of cheddar cheese (7 grams protein) 1.5 ounces (90 grams) chicken breast (10.5 grams protein)
½ cup (80 grams) broccoli (2 grams protein)
Station 5:
Organic vs. Inorganic
Molecules
Molecules can be either organic or inorganic. No, we are not talking about pesticide-free, non-genetically modified, free-range molecules like organic foods found in store. In chemistry the term organic means that a molecule has a carbon backbone, with some hydrogen thrown in for good measure. Living creatures are made of various kinds of organic compounds. Inorganic molecules are composed of other elements. They can contain hydrogen or carbon, but they can’t have both.
You may be wondering why carbon plays such a big role in life. Well, wonder no more! The reason is that carbon has 4 electrons in its outer shell, but, deep down, it really wants 8 electrons instead. With two electrons for every pair, the 8 electrons can form up to 4 single bonds, or some combination of single, double, and triple bonds. Carbon is extremely versatile. If you can act, sing, dance, and play the violin with your toes, you are way more likely to find work than someone who can only do one of those things. Not that being able to play the violin with your toes is an extremely marketable skill or anything...
Single Bond
Double Bond
Triple Bond
Think of carbon as the jack-of-all-trades. Carbon's potential to form many kinds and
Station 6: Food Labels
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Get Your Nutrition Facts Straight
The Nutrition Facts food label gives you information about which nutrients are in the food. Your body needs the right combination of nutrients, such as vitamins, to work properly and grow.
The Nutrition Facts food label is printed somewhere on the outside of packaged food, and you usually don't have to look hard to find it. Fresh food that doesn't come prepackaged sometimes has nutrition facts, too.
Most nutrients are measured in grams, also written as g. Some nutrients are measured in milligrams, or mg. Milligrams are very tiny — there are 1,000 milligrams in 1 gram. Other information on the label is given in percentages. Food contains fat, protein,
carbohydrates, and fiber. Food also contains vitamins, such as A and C, and minerals, such as calcium and iron. Nutrition specialists know how much of each one kids and adults should get every day to have a healthy diet. The percent daily value on a food label tells you how this food can help someone meet these daily goals.
On food labels, they base the percentages on a 2,000-calorie adult diet. So looking at the label above for two crackers, a grownup would see that they provide less than 1 gram of fiber, only 3% of the person's daily needs. So that means he or she would have to eat other foods to get
Connecting the food label to Organic Compounds:
Total fat, Saturated fat, Transfats, cholesterol=Lipids
Total Carbohydrate= Monosaccharide and/or Polysaccharide Carbohydrates
Dietary Fiber=Polysaccharide carbohydrates
100% of the fiber needed each day. Similarly, the person would see that the crackers provide nothing toward the daily goals for vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, or iron.
Comparing Labels
Food labels aren't ideal for kids because they're calculated based on what adults need to eat. A kid's diet might be more or less than 2,000 calories, based on your age, whether you are a boy or girl, and how active your are. Likewise, kids may need more or less of certain food components and nutrients, such as calcium and iron.
But kids can still get important information from food labels. They can get a general idea about what the food contains, how much is in a serving, and how many calories are in a serving.
Kids also can use labels to compare two foods. Which one has more fiber? Which one has more fat? Which one has more calories per serving?
The ingredient list is another important part of the label. Ingredients are listed in order so you get an idea of how much of each ingredient is in the food. When something is listed first, second, or third, you know that this food probably contains a lot of it. The food will contain smaller
amounts of the ingredients mentioned at the end of the list.
With that in mind, check ingredient lists to see where sugar appears. Limit foods that mention sugar in the first few ingredients. That means it's a very sugary food. Sugar has different names, so it might also be called high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, sucrose, or glucose.
Serving Size
The nutrition label always lists a serving size, which is an amount of food, such as 1 cup of cereal, two cookies, or five pretzels. The nutrition label tells you how many nutrients are in that amount of food.
Serving sizes also help people understand how much they're eating. If you ate 10 pretzels, that would be two servings.
Servings per Container or Package
The label also tells you how many servings are contained in that package of food. If there are 15 servings in a box of cookies and each serving is two cookies, you have enough for all 30 kids in your class to have one cookie each. Math comes in handy with food labels!
Calories and Calories From Fat
Another important part of the label is the number of calories that come from fat. People check this because it's good to limit fat intake to about 30% or less of the calories they eat.
Total Fat
The total fat is the number of fat grams contained in one serving of the food. Fat is an important nutrient that your body uses for growth and development, but you don't want to eat too much. The different kinds of fat, such as saturated, unsaturated, and trans fat, will be listed separately on the label.
Cholesterol and Sodium
These numbers tell you how much cholesterol and sodium (salt) are in a single serving of the food. They are included on the label because some people should limit the amount of cholesterol and salt in their diets. Cholesterol and sodium are usually measured in milligrams.
Total Carbohydrate
This number tells you how many carbohydrate grams are in one serving of food. Carbohydrates are your body's primary source of energy. This total is broken down into grams of sugar and grams of dietary fiber.
Protein
This number tells you how much protein you get from a single serving of the food. Your body needs protein to build and repair essential parts of the body, such as muscles, blood, and organs. Protein is often measured in grams.
Vitamin A and Vitamin C
These list the amounts of vitamin A and vitamin C, two especially important vitamins, in a serving of the food. Each amount is given as a percent daily value. Other vitamins may be listed on some labels.
Calcium and Iron
These list the percentages of calcium and iron, two important minerals, that are in a serving of the food. Again, each amount is given as a percent daily value and other minerals may be listed on the label.
Calories per Gram
These numbers show how many calories are in one gram of fat, carbohydrate, and protein. This information is the same for every food and is printed on the food label for reference.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/LabelingNutrition/ucm274593.htm#see6
Total fat includes: unsaturated fat, saturated fat, transfat fats. You have to determine the amount of
Plain Yogurt Fruit Yogurt
Trans Fat: Experts could not provide a reference value for trans fat nor any other information that FDA believes is sufficient to establish a Daily Value or %DV. Scientific reports link trans
fat (and saturated fat) with raising blood LDL ("bad") cholesterol levels, both of which increase your risk of coronary heart disease, a leading cause of death in the US.
Important: Health experts recommend that you keep your intake of saturated fat, trans fat and cholesterol as low as possible as part of a nutritionally balanced diet.
Protein: A %DV is required to be listed if a claim is made for protein, such as "high in protein". Otherwise, unless the food is meant for use by infants and children under 4 years old, none is needed. Current scientific evidence indicates that protein intake is not a public health concern for adults and children over 4 years of age.
Sugars: No daily reference value has been established for sugars because no recommendations have been made for the total amount to eat in a day. Keep in mind, the sugars listed on the Nutrition Facts label include naturally occurring sugars (like those in fruit and milk) as well as those added to a food or drink. Check the ingredient list for specifics on added sugars.
Take a look at the Nutrition Facts label for the two yogurt examples. The plain yogurt on the left has 10g of sugars, while the fruit yogurt on the right has 44g of sugars in one serving.
Plain Yogurt - contains no added sugars
Fruit Yogurt - contains added sugars
If you are concerned about your intake of sugars, make sure that added sugars are not listed as one of the first few ingredients. Other names for added sugars include: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate, maltose, dextrose, sucrose, honey, and maple syrup.
