You Will Never Believe It...
I would consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to health and nutrition. While I never actually took a nutrition class in school, I took a million other science classes like cellular biology, genetics, systems neuroscience, molecular biology, microbiology, and really many more -ologies. The suffix -ology means 'the study of' and what I was studying was the body and how the body works and interacts with your environment. I received my degree in Neuroscience, which you probably think, yeah...the brain and how the brain works..but you would be wrong!
For my degree we not only studied the brain and how the brain functions, but how the brain controls EVERY function in your body, from how you move your big toe to how you know your bladder is full to the process of digesting food and absorbing nutrients. So I felt I was sitting pretty when it came to understanding food and how food affected our bodies, and what foods are the best foods for our bodies. In addition, I was a vegetarian for a period of my life, which you can read more about why I chose to do this here, which I felt made me a thousand times more conscious and aware of what I was eating and how much protein and fiber it had, how much iron, how much calcium, etc.
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| Source: Deliciously Organic-Creamed Kale and Eggs |
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| Source: blog.foodnetwork.com |
It's All About the Butter Baby???
Carrie Vitt from Deliciously Organic is all about eating wholesome foods, which include healthy saturated fats like those from...butter. Butter? What a minute!!! Now, when I think of butter I think of unhealthy animal fat...that tastes oh so good..but is definitely not good for you. I normally try to use oils from plants, like extra virgin olive oil etc. which makes sense to me on the general level that usually foods from plant sources are healthier for you than foods from animal sources. In addition, everyone is familiar with the whole movement away from butter as they believed the cholesterol in animal fats contributed to heart disease.
I never looked into butter, the cons or the pros, because it just made sense to me to stay away from it. Carrie points out, and provides additional resources to review here, that fats from different sources are complied of different kinds and combinations of fatty-acid chains and that the saturated fats found in butter are made up of short fatty-acid chains which the body normally uses readily for energy and rarely stores as fat. Where the fat from processed plant sources such as vegetable oil, soybean oil, and margarine are comprised of long chain fatty-acids which are not readily used by the body, but are usually stored in the body as fat.
And now..
And now I realize that maybe I did not have a firm grasp on food and nutrition...actually, I am pretty sure that I did not. After reading this post by Carrie, I read some of her other posts and checked out her resources, which led me to other sites with additional information and also suggested books to read.
In light of all of the information I have learned and am learning I decided to add a few weekly series to this blog, as this blog is about my life and the changes I am making in my life, these changes definitely fit the bill and maybe it will be new information for you as well!
I'll be starting this week (Nov 12-Nov 18) so keep your eye out for:
-New Food Tuesdays where I will introduce a food or product that I have just recently learned of or am trying to incorporate into my diet or life
-What I Learned Wednesdays where I will post about all of the amazing things I am learning about health and nutrition
-Healthier Sweet Treats Thursdays where I will share recipes for healthier sweet treats, trying to cut out the refined sugars that are found in most desserts
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