Food for Thought

The well known expression, you are what you eat, is even more true as we get on in years. If we had eaten the food that was good for us in our younger years, the chances of staying healthy longer will improve as we get older. Also, the likelihood of maintaining a high quality of life throughout our senior years increases. Reading nutrition columns in newspapers and magazines or from other media sources is a good way to keep updated of current food and health related discoveries. How can we be able to estimate and gauge the truthfulness of scientific studies about food? Linda Kulman gives us good advice about how to do just that in her article, Food News Can Get You Dizzy, So Know What to Swallow. I believe that for a person to be able to make healthy dietary choices a person needs to be educated as to the credibility of healthy dietary options. Primarily, to achieve and maintain good health, food from all the major food groups should be eaten in proper proportion and regularly. Therefore, no one food is able to maintain good health when eaten alone. For instance, "No foods are so good that if you ate them to the exclusion of all else, you would be healthy," says M.R.C. Greenwood, a biologist and chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz (Kulman, 2012, p. 141). Making the correct dietary choices was, and continues to be a difficult one. Confusion can turn to frustration when many reports and studies contradict each others findings. Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating will give us the basics on what constitutes a healthy diet. The food guide basically recommends to eat in moderation and to eat a large variety of foods. The flip-flops of nutritional recommendations by the scientific community are causing bewilderment with many people who are trying to achieve and maintain a good healthy diet. Furthermore, the tale of fiber and its claimed shielding effect against colon cancer show how uncertain science can lead to confusion. Fiber helps