Healthy breakfast, balanced meals, healthy snacks – are these just slogans that others wield to make us feel guilty? Or do they have solid, scientifically based foundations that can offer us guidance for day-to-day living?

A few weeks ago, …
…at dinner in one of our local eateries, my friend pointed to his plate: “It’s great, this is a balanced meal; carbs, protein, vegetables, fat. Everything the body needs. You should be proud of me the way I’m eating.”
On the face of it, he was right about the pizza in front of him. His pizza did offer all these goodies. Only they weren’t all that good when you looked at them in detail.

Carbs – naturally, the pizza base was carbohydrate but as it was made from refined, white flour, it offered little else but calories as far as nutrition went. No fibre, vitamins or other essential nutrients. Plenty, though, for his spare tyre.

Protein – sure, cheese and pepperoni are protein. But what they brought to the table was a lot of saturated fat, the “bad” high cholesterol stuff that clogs our arteries, which far outweighed the benefits gained from the other nutrients they still contained. Let’s not talk about preservatives, either.

Vegetables – certainly, there was tomato sauce and an infant’s handful of sliced mushrooms and red pepper. It hardly satisfied the need for fibre and other plant based nutrients of the body of a grown man on a daily basis.

Fat – of course, there was plenty. In addition to the fat served up by the pepperoni and cheese, the waiter had sprinkled heart healthy olive oil on his pizza. No wonder that my friend’s wonder wheel weighed in with about 1,500 calories. That is the total daily calorie consumption for someone who wants to lose weight. All that in one meal in front of him, not not counting the wine, crackers, coffee and dessert. Which may explain why he didn’t really like my reply to his ‘balanced meal’ analysis.

The Golden Arches
In the last couple of weeks, the famous golden arches have started advertising massively again that they are now open from 6am to help people get started while still half asleep. I guess you have to be if you go for a Big Mac for breakfast. But does it really give us everything we need to get our day off to a great start?

Whatever your answer to this question, let’s not knock individual brands or types of food. What we need is a guide that tells us what’s what; that tells us reliably what to look out for, what we need, and how to avoid the common pitfalls – in other words, someone who explains Nutrition For Dummies.

Nutrition For Dummies is best used as a reference book to start you off on your journey. For that, it’s unbeatable. Use it as a starting point, and when you feel like it, dig deeper. It’ll pay off. I’ll give you some examples as we go along.

Take water, for instance. Nutrition For Dummies gives us 7 pages for starters. OK, I’ll resist the usual puns here. But after you’ve perused what the author has to say about this vital topic, you can do a lot worse than carry on with “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water” (reviewed a week ago in this blog).

The authors, Carol Ann Rinzler et al., take us through macro-nutrients (carbs, protein, fat, fibre), micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals) and phyto-nutrients (plant based nutrients we get from fruit, vegetables and herbs). Again, once you’ve satisfied your initial curiosity about, say, fruit and vegetables, you can go on to “What Color Is Your Diet?” which I’ll be reviewing here shortly.

Do you want to know if it’s safe to take supplements? There is a well reasoned chapter on food and dietary supplements, when to take them and when to avoid them. Of course, “if you’re willing to plan and prepare nutritious meals, you can almost always get your nutrients less expensively from a varied and balanced diet. This means plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, whole-grain cereals, dairy products, meat, fish, and poultry.” Who’d want to argue with the authors about that?

Superfoods are all the rage. Instead of going for the exotic, weird and wacky, you can opt for the home grown variety by following the book (I have the UK edition of Nutrition For Dummies is). Not everything has to come from far away. Apples, yoghurt, salmon, wholegrain seeded bread, and baked beans make up half the list on these isles. I’d better not tell my daughter that baked beans are classed as superfood. She might stop asking for them.

Nutrition For Dummies also has a great index, which is really helpful when you want to get your bearings fast. My recommendation: use it frequently, satisfy your curiosity about one topic or question at a time, and then move on to more detailed explanations elsewhere. Your body will certainly thank you for it.

What is the first thing you need in the morning?

Water!

Drinking plenty of water is vitally important. Here is why and where it is needed:

Where Water Is Used In The Body

We know the basics:

• Approximately 60 percent of our total body weight is water.
• During an average day in a temperate climate a person loses approximately 2.5 litres of water.
• Loss of water increases during exercise. In this case, relying on thirst alone may be insufficient to prevent dehydration.
• This is particularly true in hot environments – not just hot climates but also in the gym – or for older people over the age of 65.

How much water do you drink every day? A couple of glasses plus some sodas, coffee and fruit juice?

According to Dr. Batmanghelidj, the author of “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water”, this simply is not enough. In fact, it is not just woefully inadequate, it actually lays the foundations for a whole host of diseases. Diseases that are then treated with drugs instead of being prevented by avoiding dehydration.

“Everyone knows that water is ‘good’ for the body, but few seem to understand fully how essential it is to one’s well-being or what happens to the body if it does not receive it’s daily requirement of water.”

“Medical professionals of today do not understand the vital roles of water in the human body: medications are palliatives. They are not designed to cure the degenerative diseases of the human body.”

How can Dr. Batmanghelidj make such a claim?

Trained as a physician in the United Kingdom, he found himself imprisoned in his native Iran in 1979. Without access to medication, he was still able to treat over 3,000 fellow prisoners who suffered from dyspeptic pain with water only. Not only did this discovery save his own life, it also led him to develop his treatment and to the research that resulted in his book, “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water.”

He discusses a dozen or more conditions that we don’t commonly link to dehydration, and he shows convincingly what we can do to avoid them.

His basic prescription is straightforward:

• Your body needs an absolute minimum of six to eight 8-ounce glasses of water per day.
• Alcohol, coffee, tea, and caffeine-containing beverages don’t count as water.
• The best times to drink water (clinically observed in peptic ulcer disease) are: one glass half an hour before taking food ­ breakfast, lunch, and dinner ­ and a similar amount two and a half hours after each meal. This is the very minimum amount of water your body needs. For the sake of not short-changing your body, two more glasses of water should be taken around the heaviest meal or before going to bed.
• Thirst should be satisfied at all times.

Water is the cheapest form of medicine to a dehydrated body.

• A balanced protein intake, sufficient exercise and, most importantly, strict and absolutely regular daily water intake are the most vital and basic anti-ageing precautions.

This summary review gives you the barest outline of the treasures hidden in “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water.” Mosey over to Amazon and browse the book – fortunately, you can do it there for free. Here is the link again: “Your Body’s Many Cries For Water.” Your body, your family and your friends will thank you for it.

In the column immediately to the right of this blog post, you’ll see a box with books that I wholeheartedly recommend. They are some of my favourites. I’ll be reviewing them here not least because they cover topics that are central to our health: Water and Hydration, Heart Health For Everyone, Special Breakfast Recipes, All About Nutrition, Power Shakes and Why They Are Essential, How To Pick The Right Color Fruit and Vegetables.

You can sample these books for free on Amazon: look inside, check the table of contents, scan the index, read sample chapters, and get a good feel for them.

I look forward to sharing these books with you. If you want to see a list of my reviews, simply click on the category “Recommended Reading” in the second sidebar on the right. Enjoy.