Judi Nath - Digesting Foods and Fads

We need it to survive, yet it can kill us. It can initiate a quite pleasurable experience or a gut-wrenching incident. It makes us who we are, however, it is not the essence of our being. We interact with it on a daily basis, and it is the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry. What is it ? It is food. And it is the subject of this book, Digesting Foods and Fads .

Digesting Foods and Fads is a curated source of nutrition information using the most current scientific evidence about the food we eat, how we should eat it, and where it comes from. It provides useful, honest information to avoid scams and swindlers, and well work through what foods you need and how your body uses the nutrients found in those necessary foods. There are no gimmicks.

More than 245 million people in the United States use the Internet, which means that 245 million people are exposed to lots of misinformation and scammers trying to make money. For example, despite filters and various blocks on my email accounts, I still receive hundreds of junk emails each day, most offering me quick fixes for health issues. Consider these subject lines related to diet and exercise that arrived within the past two hours:

The Miracle Cure Big Pharma Doesnt Want You to Know AboutLiquid Gold

50 lbs. in 61 Days: New No-Exercise Skinny Pill Melts Belly FatShow Off Your Body Again

Newest Diet Product Has Unbelievable Results The Real Shark Tank Keto!

Real Weight Loss ResultsFaster, Easier, and Cheaper The Keto Diet

35+ Woman? You Deserve to Lose 47 Pounds NOW BioHarmony

New Skinny Pill Kills Too Much Fat? This Diet Is Sweeping the NationForget Diet, and Exercise

If you were to fall victim to the clickbait, youd find a lot of plausible sounding text. Text that seems easy to understand with just enough scientific terms to convince you the content is accurate. In most cases, it is nonsense, but you might not realize that until youve already given the scammers your credit card number.

Diet fads, nutritional supplements, and agricultural enterprises are multibillion-dollar industries that target our desire to be healthy. However, much of whats out there is nothing more than quackery and pseudoscience, couched within a smattering of facts. Food and food sources are inextricably linked to our lives because food is quite literally connected to living and life on this planet. This book will help you navigate the maze of fraud as it relates to eating well throughout our lives.

We want to lead healthy lives, and one factor in doing that involves understanding our options. To understand our options, we need health literacy, defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information needed to make appropriate health decisions. As I write, only 12 percent of the American population has achieved health literacy. We can do better, and this book will help.

While the biochemistry of nutrients is complex, knowing what we should eat is not. Together, well walk through topics germane to our own bodies that do change across the lifespan, as well as those subjects relevant to us as human beings living within webs of societies, who are also tasked with being stewards of the Earth. Early topics lay the foundation for understanding how our bodies use nutrients and why those nutrients are important. These groundwork subjects include an overview of the digestive system and health, controlling weight and calories, and understanding the roles of carbohydrates, lipids (fats), proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Later topics deal with the functions of water, sustainable farming and eating practices, and ways to protect our environment through our food choices.

Along the way, well explore popular diets and food fads, while sprinkling in historical details (do you know why margarine was once colored pink?) and fun facts (backyard hens can lay up to 250 eggs per year!). The goal is to equip you with lifelong knowledge to make solid (and liquid) food choices for eating well, being an informed consumer, and knowing when something is bogus.