Know your food, control your weight
THE NEW Year's resolution of my med classmate gave me a belly-aching laughter and a smile which will last the rest of 2018; that she will try her best to avoid or limit her exposure to sic facts about the staples three thingsweighing scales, mirrors, and old pictures of herswhich your columnist is sure a lot of folks may be considering as their own. And why not, for all the eating, dining and wining done in gay abandon which looked like a Bacchanalian feast, many are strugglingliterallyto get into their 2017 dresses, clothes and pants whose zippers are just bursting away.
One of the items in the short list of New Year's resolutions is to lose weight- whether it is for health reasons, for cosmetic vanity reasons or even just for the sake of love- keeping the amorous attention of a beloved otherwise, his/her eyes will go astray to a more attractive guitarshaped figure or those proverbial six-packs.
Since food is the main culprit, it is useful to take a look about the staples we put into our mouths three times a day- for other folks, even more- and see how each one contributes to our nutrition and well being..
Our teachers in grade school and high school taught us there are six food groups. Carbohydrates lead the way, with one gram giving four calories, which is also the preferred source of energy for all the 75 trillion cells of the body to function normally. The main reason here is that after a series of reactions, both physical and chemical, the carbohydrates would have been converted to glucose or what we call blood sugar, because it should be the only sugar circulating in our blood, which then with the help of hormone insulin, can enter he cells and provide energy. This aspect of carbohydrates is something many people know. However, from the health-point of view, there are carbohydrates which have the so-called " high glycemic index" which refers o the speed by which that particular food can easily raise blood sugar very fast, thus is harmful for diabetics, examples of which are candies, fructose-flavored drinks, cakes, carbonated drinks, ice cream and some fruits like atis, ripe mangoes. On the other hand, there are the ideal carbohydrteas, ideal in the sense that they serve their main purpose of being the preferred source of cellular energy, without causing metabolic disturbance in your blood sugar levels- these are the whole grains like unpolished, brown rice, which take a much longer time to physically and chemically digest thus delaying their absorption into the blood stream, which