Our foods are made up of carbohydrates, protein, and fats. We need to have the right amounts of each to maintain a healthy diet, but first we need to understand each of these food groups. As the next two videos explain, we have to be careful with carbs and fats because there are healthy and unhealthy versions, and we want to work on eating the healthy carbs and fats.
Carbs are critical to our health, and most people get about 40% of their calories each day from carbohydrates. Good carbs are complex (long chains of sugars that the body has to break down), mixed with fiber (as in fruit and vegetables), and unrefined, which usually means that the carbs have color and aren't white (like brown rice versus white rice, whole wheat bread versus white bread, and so on.) Bad carbs lead to sugar spikes in the blood, which can be the beginning of diabetes.
Ulu (breadfruit) is a traditional Hawaiian food with beneficial health effects. It is a healthier carbohydrate than many other common carbs like rice or bread. Learn more about it in this video.
We also need to eat fats. Fats make up much of our brain, our nervous system, the walls of our cells, and many hormones and chemical in our bodies. They also store energy and keep us warm. But fats are complicated- actually more complicated than carbs. In general, we want to eat healthy fats, which are mostly found in plants and fish, and avoid unhealthy fats, which are mostly found in meat and dairy. Unhealthy fats lead to clogging up our blood vessels, which can lead to strokes and heart attacks.
Protein makes up our muscles, many of our organs, and the connective tissue that provides structure to our bodies, so it's important to get enough of it. There is some disagreement among experts about how much protein a person needs each day, but it is at least .6 grams/pound of body weight, so someone weighing 150 pounds should be getting at least 90 grams of protein per day. It is usually not hard to get enough protein in our diets, but it's important that the protein be mixed with healthy, and not unhealthy, fats. For example, you can get the same amount of protein (38 grams) from 6 ounces of fish as you can from 6 ounces of hamburger, but the fish also contains healthy fats while the hamburger contains unhealthy fats.
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