Tasty Foods.

Low carb foods

2010-01-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

Low-carb diets usually begin with an ‘induction’ phase that eliminates nearly every source of carbohydrate. Often, you’ll consume as little as 20 g of carbohydrate a day. That’s less than 420 kilojoules worth—about what’s in a small dinner roll. If you’re on a 5000-kilojoule diet, that’s only about 8 per cent of your daily kilojoules. By contrast, health experts recommend that we get between 45 and 65 per cent of our kilojoules from carbs.

When carbohydrate consumption falls below 100 g, the body usually responds by burning liver glycogen (stored glucose) in muscle tissue. When those glycogen stores start to run out, the body resorts to burning body fat. But that’s a very inefficient, complicated way to produce fuel for the brain where the normal fuel of choice is blood glucose. The body tries to do it only when it absolutely has to (such as when it’s starving)—and for good reason. Turning fat into brain fuel when glucose is limited comes at a price—in the form of by-products called ketones. The production of ketones makes your breath smell strange. Ketones can also make you light-headed, tired, headachy and nauseated. Feeling lousy is certainly one way to dampen the appetite, but it’s not the one that most people would choose.

In people losing weight on a low-carbohydrate diet, the level of ketones in the blood rises markedly, a state called ketosis, which is taken as a sign of ‘success’. The brain, however, is definitely not at its best using ketones, and mental judgment is impaired. Ketosis is a serious concern in pregnant women. The foetus can be harmed and brain development impaired by high levels of ketones crossing from the mother’s blood via the placenta.

With virtually no carbs in your system, you may even have trouble concentrating. According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the human brain requires the equivalent of 130 g of carbohydrate a day to function optimally—and that’s a minimum.

testy foods

2009-02-05T01:09:00.001-08:00

Eating, an activity that takes place at least three times a day, fulfills multiple needs of an individual. At the most basic level, eating fulfills the nutritional/caloric needs. Granted, poor eating habits leads to less than optimal fulfillment of nutritional needs, but eating fulfills that need most directly. Other functions eating fulfills include socialization and cultural development. Meal times provide bonding opportunities. From loaves and fishes to the ubiquitous Friday night dates, people gathered over food to learn more about themselves, others, and engage each other in social interactions. With increasing globalization, access to different types of food from many cultures has increased, expanding one's dietary options.

With such an emphasis on foods and its relative abundance, the number of people suffering from obesity has displayed an alarming upward trend. While extreme measures to combat obesity exist, including gastric bypass, liposuction, liquid diets, grapefruit diets, and cabbage soup diets, these require either serious surgical procedures or extreme dietary changes. In the case of extreme dietary changes, these prove unsustainable over the long term, and those who have lost weight on these plans find themselves gaining the weight back. Some even gain additional weight on top of the weight regained.

Eating healthy foods in addition to losing weight provides people with many benefits, one of which is better health. New technologies in food production have enabled companies to produce more healthy versions of favorite foods. HealthyTastyFoods provides information about two such examples.

Tasty diet foods

2009-02-05T01:09:00.000-08:00