Nutrition Talk

Special thanks to Miss Yeo Siang Ing, nutritionist from Poliklinik Tudan , Miri who gave us an interesting and meaningful nutrition talk. We gain a lot of useful information from this talk. She gave us a good guide to create a reliable and attractive healthy diet menu.

Serving size

·         In the dietary guideline, serving size is the  recommended amount  of foods consumed daily in  household measures used for foods and drinks, for  example cup, plate, bowl, tablespoon and  teaspoon.

·         A serving size defined in the food pyramid may not equal to a serving size defined in a food label. 

-         The number of servings for the macronutrient intake is calculated based on 1500 kcal, 2000 kcal and 2500 kcal per day (Table 1.2) 

Read more from

www.nutriweb.org.my/publications/mjn0016/Norimah(edSP)113-123.pdf

Malaysian Food Pyramid

Malaysian Food Pyramid

The Malaysian Food Pyramid is a visual tool that is used as a guide in designing a healthy diet. It is developed as a guide to provide a framework for the types and amounts of food that can be eaten in combination to provide a healthy diet. A food pyramid consists of levels that represent various food groups. Indicated beside each food group is the recommended number of servings per day from each group. From the bottom to the top of the food pyramid, the size of each food group becomes smaller indicating that an individual should cat more of the foods at the base of the pyramid and less of the foods at the top of the pyramid.

 

Malaysian Food Pyramid (2010)

Daily serving size

(1500 to 2500 kcal/day)

Read more

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_guide_pyramid

http://www.nutriweb.org.my/article.php?sid=52

Daily Energy Requirement

Daily Energy Requirement

 

Your specific daily calorie requirement depends on your level of activity. The more active your lifestyle, the more energy you need, and vice versa. You can easily calculate your daily calorie requirement using this simple formula:

 

The best way to meet the daily requirements is to eat a  varied diet that combines cereals, fruits and  vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, legumes and dairy  products (as in Food Pyramid).

BMI Chart

You can use the BMI chart in this website http://www.thpc.scot.nhs.uk/wordfiles/BMIChart.pdf  to help you identify your BMI.

How to use the BMI Chart 

Find your height in the far left column. Then, follow along the row until you come closest to your current weight (in kilograms). 

BMI Calculator

The BMI calculator is available in this website http://www.nutriweb.org.my/bmical.php

Knowing your BMI and your energy requirement

Most of us rely on weighing scale to tell us whether we have lost or gain weight. This is not the best way because it weighs everything including muscle, bones, fats and what we ate and drank that day. It doesn’t tell you how much fat you have. In fact you should measure your body composition - the ratio of lean body mass and fat mass. Too much fat can lead to many health problems.

 

Body Mass Index (BMI)

Body weight is a major influence on health throughout life. Obese people are generally less healthy and are more prone to illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, heart diseases, gall bladder diseases and arthritis. Weigh yourself regularly and know your desirable body weight. Weigh yourself at least twice a month at the same time of the day wearing light clothing.

BMI is used to estimate your total amount of body fat. It is calculated by using the formula below:

BMI = Weight (kg) / [Height (m) x Height (m)]

  

 Using your BMI, you can determine whether you are overweight, underweight or of ideal weight.

* The BMI acts as a general guide but remember there may be reasons to modify the interpretation and you should discuss this with your doctor if you were concerned.

Read more in
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter07/articles/winter07pg16.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index

Visual Maps of Research

From the research, a visual maps is construct by using Seeing Reasoning Tools in
Visual map for Research
Map for constructing Healthy Diet Menu

Obesity: Solutions

From the research we have done, we notice that obesity is a preventable health disorder and also can be solve by using four methods:

Dieting

    The main cause of obesity is unbalanced diet. Hence, eating properly and having a healthy diet menu can help to lose weight. Obese people who want to lose weight must make drastic changes in their diet. Hence, they must learn how to calculate the energy value for the food they consume and also the nutritional facts of the foods. By limiting the energy intake daily, they can reduce their weight effectively. However, drastic reduce of energy intake maybe causing malnutrition. Therefore, they must take notes the nutritional fact so that they consume sufficient nutrients to sustain the health. 

Exercise

    Dieting and exercise are the recommended solutions to obesity and it is the healthier, save and effective ways to reduce weight. There are many exercise programs that offers by different groups of people that can lose weight naturally and quickly. Besides taking these programs, we also must live an active lifestyle to help us reduce weight. However, diet and exercise required a lot of discipline and it takes time to show the effect causing these methods the most difficult one to practice by the obese people. 

Medications

    There are a lot of products in the market for help us become slim. For example, certain gel and pills reduce weight by increasing the metabolism or reduce the absorption of lipids. Other uses the appetite suppressants to control the desire for eating. However, it is important for obese people to make sure that the products are safe to use or intake and reliable. Obese people must bear in mind, the products only helps in reducing the time and increase the effect of diet and exercise in weight lose.

Surgery

    Among the many solutions for obesity, surgery is probably the easiest in the sense that people do not need to suffer that much. Having that said, undergoing bariatric procedures is still not a piece of cake. There are many factors to consider such as surgery complications, recovery time and so on. There are many bariatric procedures such as endoscopic intragastric balloon, laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy, and laparoscopic gastric banding. Other procedures are laparoscopic roux-en-y gastric bypass and traditional gastric bypass. All these procedures can help people lose weight quickly and effectively.

Read more in

http://www.maso.org.my/spom/spom_intro.pdf

http://www.health.state.ny.us/prevention/obesity/

Obesity: Health Problems

     Obesity can lead to serious health disorder that can be life threatening. Obesity will cause the motility and metabolic rate decreases which in turn, the person become more obese and get serious medical problems.

     Obesity will cause cardiovascular diseases. The heart of obese people has to work harder to pump blood into vascular system. However, accumulation of fat will cause the heart is not capable to pump enough blood to organs and this will lead to heart failure. In order for the system to keep functioning, it is constantly getting under more and more pressure and finally will cause the enlarged heart. The arteries carry oxygenated blood will clog with layer of fats and hence it is difficult for the blood to pass through the constricted inner passage with normal flow and pressure. This results in situations known as high blood pressure. When the insufficient blood flows to heart muscle, it will lead to heart attack. Patient which is obese and have high blood pressure usually will experiencing high cholesterol. The deposition and calcified of cholesterol in arteries will lead to atherosclerosis and stroke.

      Once of the common health disorder cause by obesity is diabetes. It had been well established that obesity promotes insulin resistance through the inappropriate inactivation of a process called gluconeogenesis, where the liver creates glucose for fuel and which ordinarily occurs only in times of fasting. Diabetes will cause damage to eyes, kidney, blood vessels and nerves and usually the damage is irreversible and chronic that will lead to death.

Another health disorder cause by obesity is osteoarthritis and pain in joints. Osteoarthritis is caused by the wearing out of the substance between the joints which is called cartilage. Once it is no longer there, the bones start rubbing against one another thus causing a great amount of pain.

       Many obese people also have difficulty breathing (Respiratory disorder ). Some suffer from sleep apnea. This is a sleep disorder in which the patients stop breathing for short durations of time while asleep and end up with an oxygen deficiency. In extreme obesity cases, patients also end up with Hypoventilation Syndrome. They can’t breathe normal levels of oxygen.

      Obesity also will leads to several cancers for example gastroinstestinal cancers, gall bladder cancer, ovarian cancer, breast cancer, colorectal and prostate cancer. It is because the imbalanced hormone due to present of excess fat in body that cause cancer listed.

     Not only physical disorder, mental disorders also cause by obesity. Obese people usually facing depression due to they less likely to enjoy recreational activities because they worried about their looks. In order to make themselves happy, they eat more and this make thing even worst because they become more obese. In general, obese patient more likely to suffer from depression when they live a lonelier life and try to justify their loneliness by uncontrollable eating habit.

Source link:
http://www.obesityarticles.net/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090621143236.htm

Obesity: Causes

    Obesity is defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health ( WHO ) which is determined by the Body mass index (BMI). BMI is a formula of weight-for-height that used to classify overweight and obesity. BMI equal or greater than 25 is consider overweight and 30 is obesity.

    In 2008, 1.5 billion adults were overweight in the world’s population. Of these over 200 million men and nearly 300 million women were obese (more than one in ten of the world population was obese). Each year, 2.8 million adults die due to the health problem cause by obesity. In 2010, around 43 million of children under five were overweight. Hence, obesity is a worldwide problem.

    To solve this problem, we need to study the causes of obesity. Obesity can either develop because of lifestyle factors or hereditary factors. The main lifestyle factors that cause obesity are insufficient of no physical exercise and imbalanced diet. Dietary of energy-rich foods with high concentration of sugars, salt and lipids become the favourable for human nowadays. For example, fast food, junk food and etc. Dietary with high concentration of sugar and lipids will lead to a lot of health problems such as arthritis, cancer, stroke and sleep apnea.

    Besides that, lacking of physical exercise also is the main cause of obesity. Children, even adult, use to stay in front of television or computer in to spend their free time with the excuse release stress. Evermore, they will take in a lot of potato chips, fried chicken, burger, junks food, cola, etc while the serving the net or watching television shows. Other reasons given for preventing people from doing exercise is the insufficient opportunities for working out, for example, have no sidewalks, not save, absence of parks and sport facilities and busy working and studying behind desk.

     A hereditary factor causing obesity due to gene that causes the body efficiently converts food substrate into glucose but makes their metabolism poor. This will lead to excess glucose storage of glucose and causing it to form body fat that surrounded organs, store underneath skin.

    Other than these two factors, certain body disorder and disease also will cause obesity. Example: Cushing’s syndrome, Hypothyroidism and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome

Read more :

http://www.obesityarticles.net/

http://www.maso.org.my/spom/chap5.pdf

http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/38106/medical_conditions/do_you_know_the_causes_of_obesity.html

 How does imbalanced diet affect our health?



Balanced diet means that choosing a wide variety of foods and drinks from all the food groups according to the USDA Food Guide ( Food Pyramid ) and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension ( DASH Diet ) to take in nutrients need for health at the recommended levels.

Lots of people have wrong concept that imbalanced diet means consuming excessive of a particular food types. However, meals that lacking of certain types of nutrients or consuming inadequate nutrients also consider as imbalanced diet.
Hence, there will be a lot of health problems occurs if we don’t practice a balanced diet. For example:
1. Obesity
2. Malnutrition
3. Cardiovascular disease
4. Scurvy
5. Kwashiorkor
6. Pellagra
7. Diabetes
8. Hypertension
9. Osteoporosis
10. Atherosclerosis
11. Anemia
12. Kidney and liver damage

Further information:
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/nutrition/balanced-diet/overview.html
http://www.livestrong.com/article/252920-the-effects-of-an-unbalanced-diet/
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/causes-of-high-blood-pressure.html

How to Stay Fit & Healthy?

http://www.squidoo.com/fitness_slim

Nowadays, health problems occur due to the people practicing unhealthy lifestyle. Lots of products were invented to overcome health problem but we very doubt about the effectiveness of these products. After discussing, we found that to stay health and fit, there are only 3 major ways.

1. Quit bad habits – smoking, drugs, unsafe sex, sleep late, wake up late, eating junk food, alcohol, and don’t exercise are some of the practice that we should avoid. All this bad habits may cause us disease such as cancer, obese, AIDS, liver problems, etc. Therefore, there is no excuse for us to practice these bad habits.

2. Exercise – In today modern day’s world, some people barely exercise due to their works. However, we should exercise 30 minutes daily in order to have a healthy body. Exercise will helps to strengthen the heart and lungs, muscles and also improve circulation and body awareness, and reduce stress. Therefore, we should find chance to get up and move around. For example, after a long period of doing revision, we should get up and have a walk, maybe to the garden or to a shop. Or we can play badminton, basketball and other sports together with our friends.

3. Balanced diet – This is the major element in order to stay healthy. We should have breakfast which nowadays people likes to skip this meal because of wake up late. Besides that, the food that we consume today must include all the food categories as in the food pyramid. Drinking a sufficient of water also ensure healthy of our body.


Read more in
http://www.livestrong.com/article/97879-stay-fit-/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/15/health/webmd/main1044716.shtml
http://www.squidoo.com/fitness_slim

video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKGlk5ddzoo