The Truth About Food

Isn't it interesting how we grow up thinking something is true and never question it until someone comes along and tells us our thinking was all wrong? Doesn't that just burn you up? No? You like to learn new things, even if they fly in the face of what Mom taught you? Great. Then read on:

Cottage cheese is not a good source of calcium. You would have to eat about 4 pounds of cottage cheese every day in order to get the 1,000 mg of calcium that most adults need; and you'd be eating 6 pounds if you are a postmenopausal woman. Hard cheeses usually have 2-4 times as much calcium as cottage cheese, and milk and yogurt are still the best (300-400 mg per cup). Cottage cheese, however, is a good source of protein and is much lower in fat than most other cheeses. This makes it is a good food to include in your diet, but not as a major source of calcium.

Vine-ripened tomatoes are not necessarily more nutritious tomatoes. Vine-ripened tomatoes may taste better than the kind that are shipped green, then gassed with a plant hormone called ethylene to complete the maturing process. But the amounts of vitamin C and beta carotene are nearly the same. However, if you want a real taste treat, try growing your own tomatoes and picking them at just the right time. If you're like most people, you've forgotten what a real tomato tastes like.

Bottom-feeding, so-called "scavenger" fish (catfish, flounder, shrimp, crab, lobster etc.) are not necessarily unhealthy to eat. The truth is, these fish do not only live on waste. Depending on whether they are meat eaters or vegetarians, they will eat anything that swims or floats by, and if they do by chance eat something dead, they simply reprocess it into healthy tissue. The important thing about fish is that they tend to concentrate contamination from the water. Since different species do this in different ways, it is important to eat a variety of fish in order to make sure that you are not getting overloaded with one kind of contamination.

Eating lots of sugar does not cause diabetes. However, being overweight does tend to increase your risk for diabetes, and if you are overweight primarily because of your sugar intake, then the two may be related.

Drinking carbonated liquids when you are nauseated will not make you feel better. In fact, all fluids, but especially the bubbly ones, are hard to keep down when your stomach is upset. The better remedy is a cracker or other dry food. If you are vomiting a great deal, you will need to replenish the fluids lost. If you choose to drink sodas, make sure they are flat and at room temperature, and sip them slowly.

Carob is not a health food. True, it has much less fat than chocolate and no caffeine, but it has a lot more sugar and also substances, known as vegetable tannins, which have been shown to slow down the growth of young rats. This means that it is probably not a good idea to give large amounts of carob to young children, but then the same could be said of chocolate (unfortunately). The best thing about carob is that if you are truly allergic to chocolate, it almost (but not quite) tastes and looks like the real thing.

Fresh-squeezed juices are good for you, but they are not better than whole fruits and vegetables and they cannot cure arthritis, migraines or other chronic maladies. The late-night television salesmen who try to sell expensive juicers would have you believe that juices are medicine. They are not. Ounce for ounce, the juice of an orange, for instance, has just as much vitamin C as an orange, but you lose some other nutrients that remain in the solids.

In the case of carrot juice, one carrot has less beta carotene than a cup of carrot juice, but that's only because it takes more than one carrot to produce a cup of juice. But you lose the fiber unless the whole carrot is puréed. Juices that you can buy in the store will lose a small amount of nutrients compared to home-made juices, but it is not significant.

Vitamins do not provide quick energy. In fact, vitamins do not have any calories and thus provide no energy at all. The only way to get energy (calories) is by eating carbohydrates, fat and protein. Many vitamins are coenzymes. which means that they work with the other nutrients to release energy. Vitamin B-1 (thiamin), for example, helps to release energy from carbohydrates, and if you are deficient in B vitamins (which hardly anybody is), you may feel tired. However, the body can only use a certain quantity of vitamins, and if you take more than your body can absorb, the excess will be excreted (if they are water-soluble, like the B vitamins) or stored in the fat, if they are fat-soluble vitamins.

Sheldon Margen, M.D. (1919-2004), was a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley. Dale A. Ogar is managing editor of the University of California at Berkeley "Wellness Letter." They are the authors of The Wellness Lowfat Cookbook (Random House, 1994) and The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition (Random House, 1992).