NUTRITION & DIGESTION

Neuroscience of Taste
Why are some foodslike chocolate chip cookies delectable, while otherslike cookies made with mealwormsdisgusting? You might think you understand what makes something sweet, salty, or bitter, but a secretive corps of flavor makers, the ones who concoct the food in our supermarkets and the drinks in our favorite coffee shops, know the real truth: Not only is our perception of flavor far more complex than we imagine, involving all of our senses and even our memories, but once you master the secrets of flavor, it's easy to fool the taste buds.

Nutrients
Nutrientssubstances in foods that provide energy and materials for cell development, growth, and repair Six kinds of nutrients are available in foods: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and water.
Carbohydrates, proteins, and fats must be digested before your body can use them. Water, vitamins, and minerals are absorbed directly into your bloodstream.

Proteins
Proteinlarge molecule that is made up of amino acids and is used by the body for growth, replacement, and repair of body cells

How Much Is Enough?

You can figure out how much protein you need if you know how much you weigh. Each day, kids need to eat about 0.5 grams of protein for every pound they weigh. That's a gram for every 2 pounds you weigh. Your protein needs will grow as you get bigger, but then they will level off when you reach adult size. Adults, for instance, need about 60 grams per day. You can look at a food label to find out how many protein grams are in a serving. But if you're eating a balanced diet, you don't need to keep track of it. It's pretty easy to get enough protein. (In fact, most people eat too much protein.) Here's an example of how a kid might get about 35 grams of protein in a day:
2 tablespoons peanut butter (7 grams protein) 1 cup low-fat milk (8 grams protein) 1 ounce or two domino-size pieces of cheddar cheese (7 grams protein) 1.5 ounces chicken breast (10.5 grams protein) cup broccoli (2 grams protein)

Carbohydrates
the bodys main source of energy provide the body with glucose, which is converted to energy and used to support bodily functions and physical activity Some types of carbohydrate-rich foods are better than others:
The healthiest sources of carbohydrates whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans. Unhealthier sources of carbohydrates include white bread, pastries, and sodas. These items contain easily digested carbohydrates that may contribute to weight gain and promote diabetes and heart disease.

At meals, fill most of your plate with healthy carbohydrates vegetables and fruits should take up about half of your plate and whole grains should fill up about one fourth of your plate.

Carbohydrates
Video Self-Guided Lesson
In this lesson you will:
Identify three different types of carbohydrates Explore the chemical elements that make up carbohydrates Learn the vocabulary of carbohydrate molecules Discover what happens to carbs in the body

Healthy Eating Tip:

Fats
Why Do We Need Fat? Dietary fat helps a kid's body grow and develop like it should. Fats fuel the body and help absorb some vitamins. They also are the building blocks of hormones, and they insulate nervous system tissue in the body. So fat is not the enemy, but you'll want to choose the right amount and the right kind of fat. If fats that a person has eaten aren't burned as energy or used as building blocks, they are stored by the body in fat cells. This is the body's way of thinking ahead: By saving fat for future use, it plans for times when food might be scarce.

Types of Fat
Some fats are better than others. Here are the three major types:
Unsaturated fats: These are found in plant foods and fish. These may be good for heart health. Saturated fats: These fats are found in meat and other animal products, such as butter, cheese, and all milk except skim. Eating too much saturated fat can raise blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart disease. Trans fats: These fats are found in margarine and in certain foods that you buy at the store or in a restaurant, such as snack foods, baked goods, and fried foods. When you see "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" oils on an ingredient list, the food contains trans fats. Trans fats are also listed on the food label. Like saturated fats, trans fats can raise cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease.

Vitamins
Vitamins are water- or fat-soluble nutrients needed in small quantities for growth, for preventing some diseases, and for regulating body functions When it comes to vitamins, each one has a special role to play. For example:
Vitamin D in milk helps your bones. Vitamin A in carrots helps you see at night. Vitamin C in oranges helps your body heal if you get a cut. B vitamins in leafy green vegetables help your body make protein and energy.

Fat-Soluble Vitamins Fat-soluble vitamins can be stored in your bodysome stay for a few days, some for up to 6 months! Then, when it's time for them to be used, special carriers in your body take them to where they're needed. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are all fat-soluble vitamins.

Water-Soluble Vitamins Water-soluble vitamins travel through your bloodstream. Whatever your body doesn't use comes out when you urinate. So these kinds of vitamins need to be replaced often because they don't stick around! Vitamin C and the B vitamins are water-soluble.

Healthy Eating Tip: Eat the Rainbow

Pellagra
This video segment from A Science Odyssey profiles Dr. Joseph Goldberger and his search for a cure for pellagra, a poorly understood disease that ravaged the American South in the early 1900s. Pellagra's symptomsa skin rash that preceded confusion, hallucinations, and insanityultimately caused death in tens of thousands of people. In investigating the cause, Goldberger analyzed the diets of the victims and hypothesized that their foods lacked essential vitamins. Although he conducted experiments that supported his hypothesis, Goldberger's findings were not accepted until after his death.

Minerals
Just like vitamins, minerals help your body grow, develop, and stay healthy. The body uses minerals to perform many different functionsfrom building strong bones to transmitting nerve impulses. Some minerals are even used to make hormones or maintain a normal heartbeat. Calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, iron, fluoride, and iodine are some examples of minerals. The two kinds of minerals are: macrominerals and trace minerals. Macro means "large" in Greek and your body needs larger amounts of macrominerals than trace minerals. A trace of something means that there is only a little of it. So even though your body needs trace minerals, it needs just a tiny bit of each one.

Water
All living things must have water to survive. Without water, your body would stop working properly. Water makes up more than half of your body weight and a person can't survive for more than a few days without it. Why? Your body has lots of important jobs and it needs water to do many of them.
For instance, your blood, which contains a lot of water, carries oxygen to all the cells of your body. Without oxygen, those tiny cells would die and your body would stop working. Water is also in lymph, a fluid that is part of your immune system, which helps you fight off illness. You need water to digest your food and get rid of waste, too. Water is needed for digestive juices, urine, and poop. And you can bet that water is the main ingredient in perspiration, also called sweat. In addition to being an important part of the fluids in your body, each cell depends on water to function normally.

The Science of Picky Eaters

What makes a dish taste good to some people and terrible to others? Why do many people, particularly many kids, find broccoli and spinach unbearably bitter? Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose mother says he was always a good eater, sets out to investigate the science behind our sense of taste. It turns out that genetics largely determine our taste, and specific genes may provide new excuses for picky eaters.

Energy Needs
Your body needs energy for EVERY activity it performs. You get energy from the foods you eat. The amount of energy available in food is measured in units called Calories. You can find out how many calories are in a food by looking at the nutrition facts label. The calories in food come from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Here's how many calories are in 1 gram of each:
carbohydrate4 calories protein4 calories fat9 calories

Reading Labels
In this video, several teens try to make healthy food choices. They read the front of a container, but find out that the label on the back tells a different story.
When deciding whether a food is healthy, it is important to look at the serving size and the servings per container especially if you plan on eating the whole thing!

Check Your Understanding

One brand of low-fat chocolate milk has 8 g of protein per serving. You drink 3 servings in 1 day. How much total protein did you drink? Here are the nutrition facts for a bag of chips. Serving Size: 1 ounce. Servings per Container: 6. Calories per Serving: 140. Fat per Serving: 7 grams. How many calories are in the whole bag of chips?

You should try to limit the fat in your diet to keep your heart healthy. Understanding food labels can help you decide if this drink is a healthy choice.

A Comparison
-cup serving of vanilla ice cream
-cup serving of cooked carrots

178 total calories 2 grams of protein (2 grams times 4 calories = 8 calories from protein) 12 grams of fat (12 grams times 9 calories = 108 calories, or 61%, from fat) 15.5 grams of carbohydrate (15.5 grams times 4 calories = 62 calories from carbohydrate)

36 total calories 1 gram of protein (1 gram times 4 calories = 4 calories from protein) 0 grams of fat (0 grams times 0 calories = 0 calories from fat) 8 grams of carbohydrate (8 grams times 4 calories = 32 calories from carbohydrate)

Carrots vs. Ice cream

Fat makes quite a difference when it comes to total calories in a food. But let's face it, who's going to choose a heaping bowl of cooked carrots over ice cream on a hot summer day? It all comes down to making sensible food choices most of the time. The goal is to make tradeoffs that balance a higher-fat food with foods that are lower in fat to keep the fat intake at about 30% for the day. So if you really want that ice cream, it's OK once in a while as long as you work in some lower-fat foods, like carrots, that day.

Obesity
As Americans grapple with ever-increasing waistlines, science is looking at the biology behind the compulsion to eat. What exactly makes some people weigh 350 pounds and others 150? Researchers have discovered a chemical in your brain proven to regulate body weight, but can pinpointing a fat gene signal the road to a remedy? Learn the latest in weight research in this NOVA scienceNOW video.

Dying to Be Thin
In this documentary, NOVA examines a disturbing increase in the prevalence of eating disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia. Meet students, ballet dancers, fashion models, and other young women who are seeking recovery or have conquered their disease. Discover how leading eating disorder specialists are making dramatic advances in the diagnosis and treatment of these devastating conditions that affect millions of people.

Nutrition

Why Do We Cook?
Why are humans the only animals who cook? David Pogue explores this controversial theory and meets scientists studying the biology of digestion with the help of some surprising creatures. What can a pythonwho likes its dinner raw and furryteach us about the power of cooking?

Digestionthe process that allows your body to get the nutrients and energy it needs from the foods you eat

Foods Journey Through the Digestive Tract: The Mouth

Even before you eat, when you smell a tasty food, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Saliva begins to form in your mouth. When you do eat, your chew your food with your teeth and mix it with your tongue. Your saliva breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of mushed-up food called a bolus toward the back of your throat and into.....

The Esophagus
The esophagus is a muscular tube (about 10 in. long). It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. Once food has entered the esophagus, muscles in the walls of the esophagus move in a wavy way to squeeze the food through the esophagus. This is called peristalsis.

The Stomach
Your stomach is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. When empty, an adult's stomach has a volume of one fifth of a cup, but it can expand to hold more than 8 cups of food after a large meal! It has three important jobs: to store the food you've eaten to break down the food into a liquidy mixture to slowly empty that liquidy mixture into the small intestine The stomach churns and mashes together all the small balls of food that came down the esophagus into smaller and smaller pieces. It does this with help from the muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric juices. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food.

Small Intestine
The small intestine breaks down the food mixturecalled chymeeven more so your body can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. The small intestine extracts nutrients with a little help from the pancreas, liver, and gallbladder. These accessory organs send different juices to the small intestine to help digest food and absorb nutrients. Food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture. The inner wall of the small intestine is covered with finger-like projections called villi. The villi are where nutrients are absorbed into the bloodstream so that they can be transported to all your bodys cells. Any leftover waste (parts of the food that your body can't use) goes on to.

Guts: The Small Intestines and Digestion

After Michael Mosley eats a hearty meal, a camera is then inserted into his body to follow his ingestion. In this video, you will see the cameras journey as it makes its way into the small intestines and learn about the role that the small intestines play in digestion and the transferring of food into energy. Mosley works with a colorectal surgeon, Dr. James Kinross, who shows him how the small intestines work by examining pig intestines, which work and look almost identical to that of a human.

The Large Intestine

At 3 or 4 inches around the large intestine is fatter than the small intestine. It would measure 5 feet long if you spread it out. This is the bodys last chance to absorb some water and remaning minerals into the blood. As the water leaves the waste product, what's left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solidpoop (feces...stoolbowel movement) The large intestine pushes the poop into the rectumthe very last stop on the digestive tract. The solid waste stays here until you are ready to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom, you are getting rid of this solid waste by pushing it through the anus.

Identify the parts of the digestive tract.