What is the "right" diet? The truth about healthy eating

It is difficult to imagine another field of knowledge where there would be more myths than in the ideas about nutrition. The medical science of nutrition - dietology - can expose these myths. Therefore, a huge number of uneducated people disguise themselves as nutritionists.

Here are just a few common misconceptions that have never been confirmed in research:

• Is in evening time, after 6 hours, harmful.
• Certain foods are harmful, for example: sweet, salty, spicy, smoked, flour, meat, coffee ...
• Genetically modified foods are hazardous to health.
• You can choose individual food for each person so that you can eat a lot and lose weight (Hemocode and similar businesses use the idea that with the help of some complex methods of blood analysis you can choose a diet).
• You need to take vitamins - everything, everyone and always.

In fact, many only think that they understand what good nutrition is. There is little real scientific knowledge about healthy or unhealthy eating patterns. But the reasons for this ambiguity are clear: nutrition is very difficult, almost impossible to study. The fact is that a lot of people eat a lot of foods cooked in different ways and in different quantities for a very long time. Quantity possible features The supply is enormous, almost infinite. In addition, even small dietary habits can lead to disease or, conversely, prevent the development of the disease. It is difficult to identify the features of nutrition. The only way to learn about nutrition is to ask people what and how much they ate, but people usually can't really talk about it the next day. Even if we take into account what a person ate and in what quantity, then there is a problem of different quality, as it were, of the same food. Apples can be fresh and soaked, mashed potatoes from fresh potatoes and reconstituted from powder, milk in packages pasteurized and sterilized ... Therefore, almost all reliable knowledge in the field of nutrition reflects "rough" facts - about how total food affects health or how eating individual foods in a pure or almost pure form long time, eating exotic foods, or avoiding certain foods (such as meat) affects health.

The influence of nutrition on health is also difficult to study because the same people, in addition to nutrition, do a lot of other things - they work in different industries, including obviously harmful ones, move, rejoice and worry, smoke, drink ... People themselves differ in heredity (genetically) and according to the conditions in which they grew up, what diseases they have already had. People differ in how they digest the individual components of food and how they absorb energy from food. Naturally, the peculiarities of labor and habits of dressing are “superimposed” on this. Even in a relatively simple area - the amount of food eaten - the same amount for a person dressing lightly will meet his needs, and for a person dressing warmly it will be redundant. Accordingly, the second will have excess nutrition, which can turn into obesity.

As attractive as a diet idea is, remember that the more bizarre it is, the less valid it is likely to be. Even if it looks “scientific” and is declared the fruit of many years of work by the Boltignac Institute of Nutrition.

Twelve facts known about nutrition

1. Better to be thin, or at least not very fat. However, there is a weight-independent and more important risk factor - physical fitness. Physically trained overweight people are healthier in terms of long-term health than thin, but not trained. It is affordable: to maintain physical fitness, according to modern scientific data, at least 20 minutes of brisk walking per day is enough.
2. Losing weight is difficult and time consuming. Works often yo-yo effect or the rebound effect, that is, approximately 90% of those who lost weight with the help of a diet alone gain even more weight after a while. When "starving" people think that they easily achieve success in the early days. This is self-deception. In the early days of food restriction, fats do not break down - there are enough carbohydrates in the body to feed. A person, nevertheless, becomes easier, because only the contents of the intestines of an adult weigh about 7 kg.
3. To lose weight, more specifically, to improve health and prolong life, you need a combination of healthy eating and increased physical activity. Otherwise, not fats will be split, but muscle tissues (including the myocardium - the heart muscle). In addition, physical activity relieves bad mood those who go on a diet. All means for weight loss, including drugs, are of little effectiveness, and almost all of them are harmful to health in one way or another.
4. You need to eat more fruits and vegetables. The World Health Organization recommends consuming at least 1 kg. fresh fruits and vegetables per day. Studies on the health of vegetarians have shown that their health is no better than that of people leading a similar lifestyle (including smoking, physical activity, etc.), but it is important that with a varied plant-based diet, their life expectancy is the same, i.e. vegetables and fruits (along with nuts, etc.) can provide a person with everything he needs. Consumption vegetable oils, including, instead of oils of animal origin, it is good for health, but only non-hydrogenated vegetable oils that form the basis of margarine.
5. Consumption of fish and other seafood instead of meat has a beneficial effect on maintaining the health of adults and children, pregnant women and their fetuses. Only eating daily and in large quantities fish from one region with polluted water can be harmful.
6. In the diet of Russians, the amount of dairy products has been undeservedly reduced. They contain calcium and other components important for health. Lack of calcium is fraught with, among other things, the development of weakening of the bones (osteoporosis). Twenty years ago, whole milk was not recommended by nutritionists for fear of its cholesterol content. These fears are groundless, atherosclerosis develops from cholesterol, which is formed in the human body itself. Milk fat, milk sugar and other components of milk are important for the health of adults and children.
7. With a varied diet, including fish, including sea fish, enough meat and a variety of fruits and vegetables a common person does not need additional intake of vitamins and minerals. The exceptions are pregnant women or women planning pregnancy, for whom folic acid is mandatory (for everyone, both before conception and in the first months of pregnancy), people living in regions with a lack of iodine and some other trace elements in food and water, and people who who do not have the opportunity to fully eat and are exposed to high loads: physical (athletes) or environmental stress (cold housing, staying away from home).
8. Many ideas about proper nutrition date back to an era when the cause of peptic ulcers and gastritis was not known. At that time, malnutrition was thought to be the cause of this common disease. The belief in the need to eat soups and cereals, avoid fried, spicy and smoked - all this is a legacy of those times and theories. Peptic ulcers and gastritis are usually infectious and can almost always be treated with antibiotics. The benefit of an antigastritis diet has not been confirmed.
9. Our parents and grandparents grew up in an age of malnutrition. Then a fat person survived better during famine or during epidemics of a number of infectious diseases. Many ideas about food and nutrition rules come from their time: you need to finish everything that is on the plate, there are three or four dishes, there is a lot. However, we live in an age of overeating and overeating. Even in Russia, the problem of obesity is more acute than the problem of malnutrition. Nutritional biases are being exploited by drug manufacturers. They offer us mezim and other preparations that facilitate digestion after an act of gluttony.
10. For a hundred years, the myth about the miraculous properties of yogurt, kefir and yogurt has been popular. While these wonderful foods can aid digestion in general, their impact on the immune system is greatly overstated. In experimental studies, it can hardly be caught.
11. We have given only a few of the most common ideas about nutrition with comments on them. The food manufacturing industry, while possible to cooperate with, unlike tobacco and alcohol, relies on aggressive advertising and actively exploits public misconceptions about healthy eating to promote their products. Remember that any food advertisement and nutrition program on television, radio or in the newspapers is almost always aimed at getting you to buy some product or medicine, and not at all about your health.
12. Healthy eating is moderation in everything, even moderation. Firstly, eating, eating is one of the important pleasures in human life. Secondly, we must remember that it is not nutrition that is the main factor determining the health of our population and each person individually in early XXI century. Smoking, alcohol abuse, lack of physical activity, infections, injuries, poisoning, poor living and working conditions, lack of access to good medical care affect our health often more than small changes in diet.

Proper nutrition is one that does not lead to excessive weight gain and at the same time provides the body with the necessary components, including vitamins, macro and microelements. However, a healthy diet should only be considered in connection with in a healthy way life. In addition to the obligatory component - physical activity, a healthy diet should be accompanied by quitting smoking and alcohol abuse.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates said: “We do not live in order to eat, but we eat in order to live.”

For many millennia, people have tried to feed themselves in order to survive in the deadly struggle for existence. At first, they primitively and timidly collected tribute from the flora and fauna around them. But gradually, along with other achievements, mastered complex art cooking.

I. P. Pavlov in one of his works on the physiology of digestion wrote: “It is not without reason that concern for daily bread dominates over all the phenomena of human life. He represents that ancient connection, which connects all living beings, including humans, with the rest of the nature around them. The food that enters the body and changes here, breaks down, enters into new combinations and breaks up again, personifies the life process in its entirety, from the most elementary physical properties of the body, such as the law of gravity, inertia, etc., up to the highest manifestations human nature."

Human nutrition begins with mother's milk. It has now been established that breastfeeding should begin as early as 1.5 hours after birth and then repeated after 3.5 hours. Compliance with this important rule has a very great importance for the health of both mother and child. Moreover, during feeding for the purpose of hardening, it is recommended to keep the newborn undressed.

With early breastfeeding, the child, sucking up droplets of colostrum, helps the maturation of the mammary gland, incomplete during pregnancy. In a mature mammary gland, milk is produced on time and in sufficient quantity. At the same time, the likelihood of mastitis is sharply reduced, and under the influence of the act of sucking, postpartum processes are accelerated. In a child, colostrum improves the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract, increases resistance to infectious diseases, and significantly reduces the likelihood of diathesis.

In Moscow, early breastfeeding is successfully used in a new type of maternity hospital in the Perovsky district, which opened in 1981. There, a mother and her child live together in a separate room. The result - not a single disease of the newborn due to the fault of the hospital and not a single case of mastitis in the mother. Now in Moscow it is planned to build six such maternity hospitals.

For a long time, they were of the opinion that eating means “refueling” the body with a portion of “fuel”, no matter what and in what quantity, as long as the flame burns brightly metabolic processes and provided the energy necessary for human life. Therefore, at first it never occurred to anyone to limit oneself in food, it was believed: the more you eat, the more good. Subsequently, it turned out that with excess nutrition, the body, as it were, suffocates from the abundance of nutrients and calories and accumulates them in the form of fat. Increased fat formation is that kind of outlet with which the body gets rid of excess "fuel".

These truths have been known for a long time, but not everyone has drawn conclusions from them.

Who among us is not familiar with the desire to cram as much of the most high-calorie food into our child? “For mom, dad, grandma, grandpa...” Such overfeeding from childhood forms a stable reflex to constant chewing, saturation of food to the limit. In addition, in a developing organism, the structural foundations of fullness are laid - a large number of fat cells.

It has been experimentally established that in overweight people the number of fat cells exceeds the norm by almost 3 times. Not only that, the total amount of fat cells that we take with us as we enter adulthood depends to a large extent on how we ate during childhood and adolescence. Once appeared, fat cells, even with subsequent normal nutrition, can remain with us until the end of life.

Overeating - a kind of food addiction - is the greatest danger to the health of a person who, so to speak, has crossed the ridge. After all, the second half of life is characterized by a decrease in the activity of most endocrine glands. As a rule, the way of life itself changes: we become more restrained and calmer in everything... In everything except food, the activity of food centers often remains the same. Moreover, as Professor V. M. Dilman believes, the sensitivity of the appetite center to the action of glucose decreases with age. Therefore, the income of energy from food exceeds its expenditure. Ultimately - an increase in the waist, a second chin and other undesirable consequences of this.

A change in waist size is especially worrisome for women. No wonder they say: if a man has the right to have a body, then a woman can only have a figure. The basal metabolism of a woman is lower than that of men by 5-10%. It only increases during pregnancy and breastfeeding. During these periods, their appetite increases. But time passes, energy costs decrease, and the diet most often remains unchanged. This circumstance can also contribute to obesity.

Obese people tend to have high amounts of fatty acids in their blood, which interfere with the uptake of glucose by muscle tissue. This leads to an increase in blood and glucose levels. In response to this situation, the pancreas intensively releases its own hormone - insulin. She does this in order to “push” glucose into muscle tissue. And in the end, due to the fat barrier, most of the glucose is not directed to muscle tissue, but to adipose tissue. Thus, a vicious pathological circle of progressive obesity arises, which is often very difficult to overcome.

Already deposited fat for its existence requires a constant flow of blood saturated with nutrients and oxygen. There is a sort of stealing from other body systems. Some people think that fat storage is a good supply of nutritious foods for a rainy day, but fat is not a pantry, but a dump. During the years of the Great Patriotic War during the siege of Leningrad, obesity did not save people from death. On the contrary, the habit of constant overeating aggravated the pangs of a hungry existence and often hastened the tragic end.

To maintain health, it is important not only not to overeat, but also to properly distribute meals throughout the day. Food should be ingested in small portions. Otherwise, there is a significant obstacle to its processing by digestive juices.

Tightly eaten, moreover, often becomes inhibited, drowsy, his working capacity decreases. So the well-known saying “Eat breakfast yourself, share lunch with a friend, and give dinner to the enemy” today seems somewhat outdated.

By the way, in the republics of Central Asia, such a rule did not exist at all. The fact is that the population of this territory in the daytime, due to the heat, their appetite decreases sharply, thirst arises. People drink a lot but eat little. But in the evening after the heat decline there is an appetite. Is it worth it in such a situation to give your dinner to the enemy? Observations have shown that, despite the constant hearty dinner, the population of the Central Asian republics have good health and sound sleep.

Interestingly, in ancient rome there was also a tradition to eat once a day in the cool of the evening. During the period of the Roman Empire, multiple meals for pleasure became common among the aristocracy. However, Roman aristocrats, immediately after eating, freed their stomach from food by taking an emetic. IN Western Europe in the 16th century There was a saying “Getting up at 6 o’clock, having lunch at 10, having dinner at 6 and going to bed at 10 means to lengthen life ten times by ten.” In England, two centuries ago, the time of the first meal was noon. Breakfast was not recognized, it was introduced for the first time noble ladies who took chocolate in bed.

When compiling a daily diet, along with observing the discipline of exact time, another criterion is no less important - thrill hunger. Learn to withstand your appetite, let it settle, gain strength so that the digestive juices do not just stand out, but seem to gush. And do not be afraid that gastric juices will digest the walls of the stomach. After all, the walls are protected by a continuous layer of mucus, and this layer

constantly updated. Moreover, the renewal of mucus is controlled by such a reliable OTC as our nervous system.

Some scientists express concern that in a state of hungry passion a person will overeat. This will not happen if you master another important habit - to chew your food slowly and thoroughly. It is precisely to careful chewing that our “pre-glacial” ancestors are accustomed to. Yes, it could not be otherwise. After all, they ate, as a rule, raw plant foods.

Modern food processing has made chewing easier and lessened the work of the teeth; but the teeth of a person, not receiving the work necessary for them, gradually regressed, and the entire chewing apparatus was significantly weakened. An abnormal way of passive chewing and active swallowing developed.

Raw plant foods necessitate more intense chewing. With a raw food diet, food is chewed much more thoroughly and more slowly and therefore is well absorbed. Indian yogis gave chewing food special meaning, raising this act into a kind of ritual. Here is what one of the yogis of Ramacharaka writes about this: “Yogi hold food in their mouths, chewing it slowly and gently until it is swallowed almost involuntarily ... Everyone can experience this for themselves by taking a piece of food into their mouth and chewing slowly it so that it melts in your mouth like a lump of sugar. You will be surprised how almost mechanically food is swallowed and how slowly and pleasantly it melts in our mouths ... And from such a piece everyone can get twice as much nutrition as if he eats in the usual way.

The views of yogis on the qualitative composition of food are interesting, in which, undoubtedly, there is a rational grain. They divide food into three categories: sattva, rajas and tamas. Yogis say that a menu that includes fruits, vegetables, greens, cereals and dairy products helps to achieve harmony of body and spirit, mental balance, prudence, the ability to bright self-suggested visual representations (sattva). Food of a different kind - fish, lean meat, spicy spices, salt, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa - promotes manifestations of passion and irritability, interferes with the concentration of thoughts (rajas). Finally, there is food that makes a person lazy, inhibited, lowers his mental abilities (tamas) - fatty meat dishes and alcohol. Real yogis recognize only sattva as the basis of physical and mental perfection.

Italian dentists conducting a study in 1986 in several monasteries in Tibet got unexpected results. Examination of 150 residents showed that 70 % of them, even the elderly, there was not a single unhealthy tooth. Tibetan monks do not eat meat, do not consume sugar. Their food consists of tea, barley cakes, yak butter and water. In summer, beets, carrots, potatoes, and some rice are added.

It is curious that Buddhist monks in Japan, in order to achieve mental perfection according to the Zen system, eat only fresh plant foods (rice, barley, soybeans, beans, vegetables). And they do not just eat, but also accompany the meal with “five thoughts about food”, approximately as follows: 1) where does this offering come from? 2) while accepting this offering, I should meditate on that in which I have not yet reached perfection; 3) it is very important to watch your own heart, not to allow such shortcomings as anger and greed; 4) this food is taken as a medicine in order to maintain health in the body; 5) this food is also taken in order to achieve spiritual perfection.

It is impossible not to see the rational grain in this Zen Buddhist sermon. Our consciousness is a product of matter, our brain, and for it it is not at all indifferent to what we eat. The words of V. V. Veresaev from the "Doctor's Notes" sound even more definite: "A man is what he eats."

Eating a variety of raw plant foods does more than just make you feel full. It develops the sense of smell and taste, a person begins to notice subtle aromas and smells and experience new taste sensations.

Prolonged thermal processing of raw plant products leads to some biological depreciation of food. For example, when cooking, food softens, but protein substances partially coagulate and are more difficult to digest. This entails the need to increase the amount of protein in food and, as a result, unnecessarily weighs down the excretory organs.

When cooking, food changes its taste, becomes insipid and requires the addition of salt. The necessary addition of table salt to cooked food leads to its leaching and a decrease in the activity of vitamins.

With the development of civilization, people began to consume more and more salt. Academician V.V. Parin wrote that in the process of evolution of mammals living on Earth the main problem survival almost always consisted in adapting to the lack of salt in environment. In this case, naturally, individuals with a particularly developed ability to retain salt in the body should have survived. The same mechanisms arose in the process of evolution in humans. With the problem of excess salt, according to the famous Soviet physiologist G. I. Kositsky, the human body first met quite recently - only 3-4 millennia ago. In this regard, the mechanisms that counteract excess salt in our body have not yet been sufficiently developed.

Meat food cooked on fire began to enter the life of our distant ancestors a very long time ago. For example, in Africa, between Lakes Victoria and Turkana, in 1982, the remains of fires were discovered. The geological age of the layers in which they were located is 1.4 million years. Around these ancient bonfires lay animal bones and stone tools. Later, about 1 million years ago, with the onset of ice ages, the possibilities of eating plant foods decreased sharply. People were forced to completely switch to eating meat, processing it on fire for better absorption. ice ages passed 10 thousand years ago, but the habit of eating meat has become entrenched and has become a tradition among many peoples. Unfortunately, this tradition does not always contribute to the preservation of human health. Often, in connection with this, metabolic disorders and inflammatory diseases occur, especially in the gastrointestinal tract, and a favorable background is formed for the development of other ailments.

By the way, we also note the fact that an excess of meat protein in food contributes to the occurrence of appendicitis. During the Great Patriotic War, this disease fell almost to zero, and in the post-war years, medical statistics again recorded a sharp increase in the number of operations to remove an inflamed appendix. The fact that the cause of appendicitis is an excess of protein in the diet was said back in 1901 by the French scientist Shanpionière. The modern food of the townspeople, rich in protein and poor in fiber, is undoubtedly to blame for the fact that the lively activity of surgeons who remove appendixes by the thousands does not subside. In this regard, it is worth mentioning an article published at the end of 1980 in the English journal Medical News, the authors of which also associated this disease with a low fiber diet. The British heeded the voice of reason and in the last decade began to eat more wholemeal bread, and most importantly - fruits and vegetables. The results were not slow to affect: the number of appendicitis operations in England decreased by almost 40 in 13 years %. It can be assumed that the life span primitive man, who obtained his food by hunting, was not least determined precisely by an excess of protein: primitive people who lived a little, on average 30 years, died, in all likelihood, also from appendicitis during a particularly successful hunt.

It has long been noted that the human body is able, as it were, to determine what kind of food it consumes. As early as 1937, P. Kushakov noticed that when eating boiled food, the so-called food leukocytosis is noted: a huge number of leukocytes are sent to the intestinal walls, as in the case when any damage occurs. It turns out that the body reacts to boiled food as an invasion of something unnatural and hostile to the body. Repeating several times from day to day, such a reaction, according to the Bulgarian scientist T. Todorov, exhausts the body. To prevent nutritional leukocytosis and its consequences, he recommends going at least for a deceptive maneuver: start eating with raw snacks, and then eat boiled.

Of course, this does not mean that all plant foods should be raw. Potatoes, some legumes, cereals and cereals need to be cooked, but short-term and gentle.

In the modern diet, two main directions can be distinguished. One is represented by gourmet European cuisine, for which the idol of food is meat and various meat products. The other is vegetarianism, which involves eating mainly raw plant foods. The main issue that causes controversy between representatives of these two directions is the question of the daily intake of protein by a person, which is much more in meat than in most plant products. Let's touch it too.

Back in the last century, the German physiologist Voit, believing that instinct had prompted a person for many millennia what a rational diet should be, decided to determine the rate of protein and other nutrients in the diet of families of average prosperity. He collected personal data on their consumption of various foods, and in the end it turned out that instinct prompted Font's compatriots to consume daily 118 g of protein, 56 g of fat and 500 g of carbohydrates. More than 100 years have passed since then, but until recently, some experts still believed that a person weighing 78-79 kg, who does not bother himself with hard physical work, must certainly include in his daily diet all the same 118 g of protein (based on 1 .5 g of protein per 1 kg of body weight).

However, as they say, times are changing, and we are changing with them. And in our age of production automation, protein norms have to be adjusted to reduce them.

On March 22, 1982, the collegium of the USSR Ministry of Health approved the new “Norms of physiological needs for nutrients and Energy for Various Groups of the USSR Population”.

Speaking about the dangers of overeating and excessive protein intake, one should not go to the other extreme - excessive restriction of food intake. “If an excessive and exclusive passion for food is animality,” wrote I. P. Pavlov, “then arrogant inattention to food is imprudence, and the truth here, as elsewhere, lies in the middle: do not get carried away, but pay due attention ... »

However, this seemingly common truth is still being reviewed from time to time. So, the Moscow doctor G. S. Shatalova relatively recently proposed to include in the daily diet of any person only 20 g of protein, 30 g of fat and 100 g of carbohydrates. Naturally, this proposal aroused many objections. For example, K. S. Petrovsky believes that we are supposed to consume 100 g of protein, 87 g of fat and 310 g of carbohydrates daily (to cover energy costs of 2500 kcal).

Obviously, both proposals should not be considered the ultimate truth. It seems more reasonable point of view of the Swiss dietitian M. Bircher-Benner, according to which the daily diet of a person should contain 30-40 g of proteins, provided that they eat mainly fresh plant products.

This is also supported by the research materials of the International Committee on Protein Requirements published in 1974 by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to these data, if a person's energy needs are fully met by carbohydrates and fats, then the rate of daily protein intake (provided that the proteins are complete) is only 0.55 g per 1 kg of weight.

As an illustration of the above, we present the most typical daily diet of the journalist A. N. Chuprun we know (more about A. N. Chuprun's naturism)

The total calorie content is 2055 kcal.

A. N. Chuprun believes that it is this kind of nutrition that he owes complete deliverance within two months from a severe form of vegetative-vascular neurosis, from which he had previously been unsuccessfully treated for more than 20 years with enhanced nutrition and drugs, and recovered ... to disability. Be that as it may, but the man himself proved that the protein diets recommended by WHO deserve the attention of modern dietitians.