It's All About Nutrition!

Articles About Nutrition and Health

I was reading some health articles about nutrition and health on the MSN website and found a couple I thought you might be interested in.

One of the articles is titled Avoiding Mercury in Fish and answers the following questions…

What is mercury?

Do you need to avoid the mercury found in fish?

How should you change your eating habits to reduce your exposure to mercury in fish?

Should a woman who is not planning a pregnancy be concerned?

You will also find some links to additional related resources

You can read the full article HERE

The other article is titled New Facts About Fish and answers the following questions…

I’m worried about mercury contamination. Should I skip fish altogether?

Which fish is healthier: farm-raised or wild?

What are some easy ways to eat more fish?

What’s safest for our oceans — and for you, when it comes to mercury and PCBs?

You can read the full article HERE

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Food Additives to Avoid

I just read an article about what food additives to avoid and thought the information was valuable enough to pass on to you. It was written by Jean Weiss for MSN Health & Fitness.

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Whoever coined the term food additives had it all wrong. Including something new in a food doesn’t always add up to more, at least when it comes to your health. Studies that test the safety of additives are based on animal trials. It is difficult to deduce whether the results of an animal study equate to human health, though many of these studies show that some additives could be cancer-causing. Read the full article here

How to Choose Healthier Pasta

This video will show you how to choose healthier pasta. This is especially important if you love to eat pasta, but you’re worried that it’s just empty carbs? Prevention Magazine’s Nutrition Director Cynthia Sass says fiber-rich whole grains are the way to go.



How to choose healthier pasta

What are “calories”?

General Nutrition: What are “calories”?

Calories are energy measurements in food, and the number of calories you have will determine your health and your weight. You need calories for every metabolic function in the body. You need calories for energy to do any kind of atheletic sports, activities, etc. Anything in your life that’s an activity, you need calories for. The challenge for most people today is that they’re eating so much more than they require. For example, 3500 calories make a pound of fat, or a pound of weight. If you’re getting too many calories in the food you are eating, you’re going to gain weight. It’s automatic that if you need to lose weight, you need to cut calories. I know there’s a lot of fad diets around that don’t talk about calories, but the fact is when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the whole thing, it’s the number of calories you take in and the number of calories you burn – through metabolic activity, or what the body is doing and working on, or through activities that you do in your life. We often see people who go on a diet, and they don’t really lose much weight because they’re only cutting down their calories and not actually increasing their activity. The two things together will increase your ability to lose weight faster. The other point is that lean muscle tissue is very active tissue and it will actually burn calories faster.

What information can be found on a

“food label”?

General Nutrition: What information can be found on a “food label”?

The main thing to think about with a food label, and what I say when I’m teaching my clients how to read a food label, is that it’s not that they have to read everything on that label. They have to focus in on a few things. One is the serving size because if you get a bottle of some sort of juice and it says, “50 calories per serving,” but there are four servings in that bottle, then you have to figure out that you’re getting four times that if you drink the whole bottle. So that’s one thing; understanding what a serving size is in that package or container. Number two is really looking at the list of ingredients. How many ingredients are in that particular food? If there’s more than four or five, it’s probably not a whole-food-based kind of product; it’s probably a very synthetic kind of product with a lot of added things to preserve it, to keep it on a shelf for a long time. That would not be a good idea. You also look at what the first ingredient is. If it says “wheat flour,” you know you’ve got a white-flour product there. If it says “whole-wheat flour,” then you’ve got something that’s got whole wheat as the foundation. Then, you look at what the next ingredient is, and the next ingredient. As long as you can read all of the ingredients and know what they are, that’s a good start point. Then, it starts with the healthiest product. If it starts with sugar, don’t pick it up and buy it. That’s something that you don’t need in your diet. However, if it’s got a whole-grain base, that’s probably a good alternative. The next thing to look at is how much sugar and how much sodium there is in the product, and what kind of fat it is in the product. Is it trans-fatty acids? How much of the trans fats are inherent in it? How much fat overall is there? I usually aim with my clients to teach them to have no more than 3 grams of fat per serving. That way they get a good serving size of fats but not too much, and especially, as I said a minute ago, you don’t want to have trans-fatty acids.