Explore the "why" of nutrition

Each of us eats about fifty tons of food in a lifetime. From this mountain of edibles we obtain four basics of life ; water, energy, protein, and a handful of vitamins and minerals. Nutrition Basics is about why we need to eat and why we have to choose carefully.

Water: Water is our most urgent nutritional need and probably the one least studied in nutrition education. Find out why the body uses so much water, discover how much water we need and how "water in" equals "water out."

Energy: Energy has to come from food. Everybody knows that, right? Answer this question. How many calories do you burn jogging for thirty minutes? Time's up. The answer is ; no calories. Zip, nada, zero. You can't burn calories, and you can't eat them either. OK, so it's a trick question, but a trick designed to teach your students the basics of human energy. Learn the difference between carbs and fats, find out why calories count, and learn why most diets don't work.

Protein: You've seen sci-fi flicks where a cyborg is blasted by fire, hit by bombs, shredded by a ten ton masher, then generates new skin and body parts? We do that every day! Like the sci-fi cyborg, you grow over nine pounds of new skin each year. You constantly rebuild all your body parts. Since you picked up this catalog, your stomach has replaced half a million cells in its lining. You completely re-line your stomach every three days! That's protein at work.

Vitamins and Minerals: We eat rocks. The minerals in all the living bodies on earth are recycled. The iron in the blood in your veins today might once have been part of a cliff in Arizona centuries ago. Discover why we need to "eat rocks" and what happens if we don't get vitamins from food.

Nutrition Basics is ideal for courses in nutrition, life sciences, and food. Use it to correct the many commonly held misconceptions about why we eat.