Archive for July, 2008
The Importance Of Vitamin A And Protein For Dieters
Theoretically, you could get adequate protein from a strictly vegetarian diet, but practically it would be extremely difficult. For one thing, it would require the eating of huge amounts of food. Most vegetarian diets make excellent use of eggs, milk, and cheese, and to that extent are only partly vegetarian.
Animal proteins are stressed in your reducing diet for another reason. Recent knowledge indicates that Vitamin A is not always well absorbed in the form in which it occurs in green plants. Such plants, normally rated as excellent sources of the vitamin, contain it in yellow pigments of which the chief is carotene.
This does not become the vitamin until it is altered in your liver. It has been found that some persons absorb as little as 5% of available carotene; hence, though their food contains plenty of Vitamin A units, they derive no benefit from it.
Animal foods, however—eggs, butter, liver, milk, cheese —contain the true vitamin. The animal has done all the work of converting the carotene into Vitamin A, saving you the trouble.
That this is no trifling virtue is indicated by the belief of many authorities that Vitamin A is likely to be deficient in many reducing diets. There is a natural tendency to cut down on milk, butter, and cream—relatively rich in Vitamin A—because these contain considerable amounts of fat.
There is real danger in eliminating all dairy products from a self-chosen reducing diet. One man did just that and got his case reported in medical records. His skin became dry and rough; his hair grew brittle, lost its luster, and also lost its anchorage, starting to fall out. His dry skin tormented him with its itchiness. When he finally went to a doctor, he was promptly placed on a rational diet and his symptoms cleared up with Vitamin A concentrates.
Still another reason why reducers should be liberal in their use of animal products is found in the recent discovery that mineral oil interferes with the absorption of vegetable carotene in the intestine.
Because it has no caloric value, mineral oil is a popular ingredient of salad dressings used by dieters. This is good sense because salad dressings can be very high in calories.
An excellent green salad, crammed with enough carotene to make several thousand units of Vitamin A, has its potency in this respect dangerously lowered by mineral oil dressings. True Vitamin A, from concentrates or animal foods, is not particularly affected by mineral oil.
The minimum amount of protein that you can get along on reasonably well can be roughly figured at slightly less than 2 calories per pound of ideal weight. This amount, however, will merely take care of your replacement needs and won’t have time to jump on the backs of other calories to spur them into action.
It is only surplus protein calories that stimulate the specific dynamic action we have been talking about. That is why your reducing diets provide a generous surplus.
Tags: vitamins, proteins, low calories, vitamin A, reducing diet, dieters
Why Food With Protein Is So Good For Your Diet
Naturally you can’t eat a diet of pure protein, although protein can be considered the one indispensable food since fractions of it can be converted into fat and carbohydrate, but not vice versa.
You can see why the new slimming diets emphasize protein, because liberal allowances can be expected to cause greater loss of weight than would the same number of fat or carbohydrate calories.
When you eat proteins you really hire a Simon Legree to crack the whip on lazy calories, making them buckle down to honest toil instead of picking daisies as they drift to your fat depots.
Nor is the slimming aspect of proteins their sole claim to your respect. They stimulate the general efficiency of your body, replace worn out tissues, furnish materials for zippy gland hormones and build vigor and stamina.
Many people still have a vague impression that a high-protein diet is unhealthy. Doctors used to think so too, but the newer knowledge of nutrition has pretty generally knocked the props from under this idea. One supposedly dangerous effect of protein was its action on the kidneys.
Various ailments of these vital organs were laid to heavy eating of protein. In recent months, doctors have discarded this superstition so completely that today high-protein diets are prescribed for some—not all—kidney ailments.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, spent several years living with Eskimos on an exclusive meat diet. According to theories then current, he should have been struck down by all manner of ailments, from Bright’s disease to scurvy. He was so uncooperative with theory, however, as to thrive on his all-meat, high-protein diet.
His "unbalanced" eating habits failed even to raise his blood pressure, and he was downright stubborn in his insistence that he never felt better in his life. Later he lived on the same diet in New York, where physicians could clap stethoscopes on him.
They couldn’t find a thing wrong with him. Since then there has been abundant evidence that high-protein diets can be continued indefinitely without ill effect, except in certain cases of disease.
Experiments leading to the belief that protein was dangerous to kidneys were performed, in large part, before the all-important effects of vitamins and minerals were well understood. Another supposed danger of proteins—that they putrefy in the intestines and produce poisons absorbed by the body—is much more theoretical than real, on the basis of present conservative opinion.
An inflamed, diseased colon can conceivably absorb toxins through its walls. That a normal colon will do is extremely doubtful. The theory of poison absorption is the popularly horrifying one of "autointoxication." Curiously, no one has ever satisfactorily demonstrated the presence in the blood, or the. specific identity of, the postulated poisons that stage these Borgian Blitzkriegs. One famous experiment by Dr. Walter Alvarez of the Mayo Clinic has demonstrated that every symptom attributed to "autointoxication" can be produced by stuffing the rectum with cotton.
The symptoms are real, but the causes are more mechanical than chemical.
Meat is by no means the only excellent source of protein. Other animal products—milk, eggs, cheese—are outstanding. A protein is considered biologically complete if it furnishes liberal amounts of the amino acids needed by the body.
Tags: diet, protein food, lose of weight
