Nutrition and your future 9781422228746, 1422228746, 9781422228852, 1422228851

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Nutrition can be complicated. How do you know which foods are healthy and what aren’t? How much should you eat? Does the way you eat today really shape your life in the future? The food choices you make today can have a big impact on your life 10, 25, or even 50 years from now. In Nutrition and Your Future, find out how your decisions about food and nutrition are important to your health in the future—and how you can be healthy for life by making good choices now.

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ISBN 978-1-4222-2885-2

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9 781422 228852

Nutrition and Your Future

Mason Crest 450 Parkway Drive, Suite D Broomall, Pennsylvania 19008 www.masoncrest.com Copyright © 2014 by Mason Crest, an imprint of National Highlights, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. First printing 987654321 Series ISBN: 978-1-4222-2874-6 ISBN: 978-1-4222-2885-2 ebook ISBN: 978-1-4222-8947-1 The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcopy format(s) as follows: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crockett, Kyle A. Nutrition and your future / Kyle A. Crockett. pages cm. – (Understanding nutrition: a gateway to physical & mental health) Audience: 10. Audience: Grade 4 to 6. ISBN 978-1-4222-2885-2 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4222-2874-6 (series) – ISBN 978-1-42228947-1 (ebook) 1. Nutrition–Juvenile literature. 2. Diet–Juvenile literature. 3. Health–Juvenile literature. I. Title. RA784.C67 2014 613.2–dc23 2013009806 Produced by Vestal Creative Services. www.vestalcreative.com

Understanding Nutrition

A Gateway to Physical & Mental Health

Nutrition and Your Future Kyle A. Crockett

Mason Crest

Contents Introduction 6 1. You Are How You Eat 9 2. Your Future Health 25 3. Making Good Choices Today 35 Find Out More 46 Index 47 About the Author & Consultant and Picture Credits 48

Introduction by Dr. Joshua Borus

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here are many decisions to make about food. Almost everyone wants to “eat healthy”—but what does that really mean? What is the “right” amount of food and what is a “normal” portion size? Do I need sports drinks if I’m an athlete—or is water okay? Are all “organic” foods healthy? Getting reliable information about nutrition can be confusing. All sorts of restaurants and food makers spend billions of dollars trying to get you to buy their products, often by implying that a food is “good for you” or “healthy.” Food packaging has unbiased, standardized nutrition labels, but if you don’t know what to look for, they can be hard to understand. Magazine articles and the Internet seem to always have information about the latest fad diets or new “superfoods” but little information you can trust. Finally, everyone’s parents, friends, and family have their own views on what is healthy. How are you supposed to make good decisions with all this information when you don’t know how to interpret it? The goal of this series is to arm you with information to help separate what is healthy from not healthy. The books in the series will help you think about things like proper portion size and how eating well can help you stay healthy, improve your mood, and manage your weight. These books will also help you take action. They will let you know some of the changes you can make to keep healthy and how to compare eating options. Keep in mind a few broad rules: • First, healthy eating is a lifelong process. Learning to try new foods, preparing foods in healthy ways, and focusing on the big picture are essential parts of that process. Almost no one can keep on a very restrictive diet for a long time or entirely cut out certain groups of foods, so it’s best to figure out how to eat healthy in a way that’s realistic for you by making a number of small changes.

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• Second, a lot of healthy eating hasn’t really changed much over the years and isn’t that complicated once you know what to look for. The core of a healthy diet is still eating reasonable portions at regular meals. This should be mostly fruits and vegetables, reasonable amounts of proteins, and lots of whole grains, with few fried foods or extra fats. “Junk food” and sweets also have their place—they taste good and have a role in celebrations and other happy events—but they aren’t meant to be a cornerstone of your diet! • Third, avoid drinks with calories in them, beverages like sodas, iced tea, and most juices. Try to make your liquid intake all water and you’ll be better off. • Fourth, eating shouldn’t be done mindlessly. Often people will munch while they watch TV or play games because it’s something to do or because they’re bored rather then because they are hungry. This can lead to lots of extra food intake, which usually isn’t healthy. If you are eating, pay attention, so that you are enjoying what you eat and aware of your intake. • Finally, eating is just one part of the equation. Exercise every day is the other part. Ideally, do an activity that makes you sweat and gets your heart beating fast for an hour a day—but even making small decisions like taking stairs instead of elevators or walking home from school instead of driving make a difference. After you read this book, don’t stop. Find out more about healthy eating. Choosemyplate.gov is a great Internet resource from the U.S. government that can be trusted to give good information; www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource is a webpage from the Harvard School of Public Health where scientists sort through all the data about food and nutrition and distill it into easy-to-understand messages. Your doctor or nurse can also help you learn more about making good decisions. You might also want to meet with a nutritionist to get more information about healthy living. Food plays an important role in social events, informs our cultural heritage and traditions, and is an important part of our daily lives. It’s not just how we fuel our bodies; it’s also but how we nourish our spirit. Learn how to make good eating decisions and build healthy eating habits—and you’ll have increased long-term health, both physically and psychologically. So get started now!

Introduction

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1

You Are How You Eat

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ood. Sure, you eat it all the time. But how much do you really think about it? Food is a lot more than just something tasty. Food has a lot to do with staying healthy, feeling good, and making your future bright. Everyone has to make food choices. Young people have to decide what to order for lunch, whether or not to eat a snack, and how much to eat for dinner. You can choose to eat foods that will help you feel good and grow up strong—or you can choose foods that do the opposite. All the food choices you make add up to nutrition. In other words, nutrition is all the ways you eat food, from the kinds of food you eat to how big your meals are.

Food is a big deal! All the food choices people make really add up. The choices you make now will affect you in the future.

What Does Food Have to Do With Health? Your health depends on a lot of things. It depends on how much sleep and exercise you get. It depends on washing your hands. It depends on getting checkups at the doctor. And it depends on eating healthy. Food is directly tied to your health. Healthy foods keep your organs healthy. They help you grow and develop. They keep What Is Diabetes? you from getting sick as often. The good effects of healthy foods are endless! Diabetes is a disease that makes Choosing to eat in an unhealthy way has a person’s body unable to use the opposite effect. Unhealthy eating habits sugar normally. end up making you sick, both now and in the future. Weight gain, heart problems, and diabetes are all results of unhealthy eating. You’re in control of what you eat. It’s a choice you can make that will help you be the best you can be, in all sorts of ways.

Some Nutrition Basics Good nutrition means choosing to eat healthy foods in healthy ways in general. You don’t have to eat carrots for every meal to have good eating habits. In fact, eating only carrots would be unhealthy! Instead, your health depends on whether you choose to eat a variety of healthy foods most of the time. It’s okay to eat candy once in a while, just not all the time. Healthy eating isn’t that hard.

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Some people say that you can lose weight and look better by eating just one thing (like a grapefruit for every meal), but it’s much healthier to eat a balanced diet.

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Nutrition involves a couple of things. What’s a Diet? One thing is the kind of food you eat in your diet. Healthy foods are healthy because they Your diet is everything you eat. have a lot of nutrients in them. Nutrients You could have a diet made up help you grow and be healthy. Some nutrimostly of fruits and vegetables. ents help you see, others keep your bones Or you could have a diet made strong, and others keep the amount of water up only of pizza and hamburgin your body just right. ers. A good diet is made up of Fruits and vegetables have a lot of nutrihealthy foods. ents in them, which is why they’re healthy. Diet can also mean a special When you eat fruits and vegetables, you get way of eating to lose weight. Peothose good nutrients, and your body works ple on a diet eat special foods or the way it’s supposed to. eat less so they will lose weight. Unhealthy foods don’t have many nutriWhen someone says they are “on ents. Or they have too much of certain nua diet” or “dieting,” they are trytrients. Soda is a good example. Soda doesn’t ing to lose weight. have much in it except for sugar. Although people do need a little sugar every day, they don’t need much. Too much sugar leads to What Are Nutrients? health problems. Soda has more sugar than people need, so it’s considered unhealthy. Nutrients are substances the Different foods have different nutrients body needs to work right. Our in them. When you eat a bunch of healthy bodies don’t make nutrients, so foods, you get all the different nutrients you we have to get them by eating need. A good way to think about the varifoods. Different nutrients include ety of foods is to think of these food groups: vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and protein. protein, and fat. You should eat a variety of food from each group every day. Grains have certain nutrients, vegetables have others, and protein foods have still others. That’s why just eating carrots all the time is a bad idea. Even though carrots are a healthy food, they only have a few nutrients, like vitamin A. They don’t have other

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nutrients, like calcium. You wouldn’t get much calcium in your diet if you only ate What Are Portions? carrots. Another part of good nutrition is how The amount of food you choose to much you eat. People today tend to eat eat in one meal or snack is a pormore than they need. Portions of meals and tion. A big portion would be eatsnacks are very large. And people eat more ing two sandwiches and a heaping often than is necessary. mound of french fries for lunch. Humans eat food because it has energy in Big portions of food tend to be it. We can’t power ourselves, so we have to unhealthy because we don’t need use food as fuel. Our bodies use the energy to eat that much food. A healthier from food to keep going. And the way we portion would be one sandwich measure energy is in calories. and a few fries. People need about 2,000 calories every day. Some need a few more or less, depending on how much they weigh or how active they are. But in general, the body burns up 2,000 calories a day doing what it needs to do. Those 2,000 calories might seem like a lot of food, but it’s not. Because portions are so huge, someone could eat 1,000 calories or more at one meal. A fast-food meal of a cheeseburger, large fries, and large soda clocks in at over 1,000 calories. That’s over half of all the calories you’d need for an entire day in one meal! That fast-food meal is unhealthy because it’s so big. (It’s also unhealthy because it has too much sugar, salt, and unhealthy fat in it, which are all nutrients people should limit.) Eating too many calories every day causes weight gain. The body can’t use up all the extra calories, so they end up being stored as fat cells. Those fat cell accumulate into extra weight. And weight gain causes lots of health problems. Healthy eating focuses on eating the right amount of food. Meals should be filling but not too big. Snacks should be small. But too little food is also unhealthy. Eating too few calories leads to weight loss and makes you sick. Healthy eating is about a balance.

You Are How You Eat

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The kinds of food choices you make each day affect how you feel and how much energy you have. If you don’t make healthy choices you can end up feeling tired more often or getting sick more than someone who eats a healthy diet.

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Your Health Today

What Is Physical and Emotional Health?

Physical health has to do with Healthy eating isn’t just something that how your body is working. You is good for your future health. You might are physically healthy when your find it hard to choose to eat healthy because organs are all working right and it will help you out in the future. After all, you are not sick. Emotional health it’s probably hard to imagine yourself in has to do with how well your mind thirty years. Why should you care about is working. You are emotionally how healthy you are then? You’re much healthy when you are generally more interested in eating tasty food like ice happy and feel like you’re in concream now. trol of your life. However, healthy eating has a lot to do with how you feel right now. Have you ever What Does gotten a headache from eating too much sugar? Or felt tired before lunch, and then Energetic Mean? great after you filled your stomach? The way you felt had to do with what you ate, or Someone who is energetic has how much you ate. lots of energy. That means she Food affects how healthy you are right can run around and get things now. It affects your mood and how you feel. done without feeling tired. It even affects how well you do in school, at sports, and when you’re just hanging out with friends. Food makes a difference to your physical health every day. Eating well will help everything in your body work a little better. Digestive problems may fade away. Headaches might show up less often. You’ll have more energy. Some foods make you feel tired and slow. Foods with a lot of sugar do that. Pay attention the next time you eat sugar—you’ll probably feel pretty energetic, and it will even make you feel a little jittery. Then you feel the energy fade away, and you just feel tired.

You Are How You Eat

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Checking the labels on the foods you eat is a great way to start learning about healthy eating choices. You can check how much sugar, fat, and salt are in the foods you eat, and find out how many calories are in a serving.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Healthy foods are great sources of longlasting energy. Instead of feeling energetic What Is the for just a little while, you’ll have enough enImmune System? ergy to keep going all day long. You should also care about good nutriYour immune system fights off tion now because it keeps you from getting germs that get into your body. colds, the flu, and other sicknesses so often. All the parts of your immune sysThe nutrients in healthy foods make your tem attack anything that enters immune system stronger. the body that shouldn’t be there. Food doesn’t work like medicine, White blood cells and antibodies though. You can’t just eat an orange when in the blood are two parts of the you feel yourself coming down with a cold immune system. and expect it to cure you! You have to eat healthy before you ever get sick to get the full effects. Food isn’t magic either. Even if you eat the healthiest food possible, you still might get sick. Getting sick is just a normal part of being a human. What healthy eating might do for you is help your body get better at fighting germs. You might get sick less often, and when you do get sick, it might not be as bad. What you eat will also affect your emotional health. Good nutrition helps you stay in a good mood. Certain nutrients keep your brain healthy and happy. Eating the right amount at the right times also keeps you in a good mood. Some people get very tired and grumpy when they’re hungry. They need fuel to keep them going and to keep them happy. Learning when you need to eat to avoid bad moods is part of good nutrition. Again, healthy food isn’t a miracle. You won’t suddenly be happy all the time when you start making healthy food choices. Life will still go on as normal, with ups and downs. You will have a better chance of being in a positive mood, though.

You Are How You Eat

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Making healthy food choices can help you pay more attention in class. When you eat right, you’ll feel better, which will help you think clearly and remember more of what you learn.

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Nutrition and Your Future

School and Sports All of those benefits really add up. Good nutrition keeps you healthy and happy, but it also helps you out right now in other ways. For example, good nutrition can really help you out with school. Eating healthy makes it easier to learn in school. Remember, people who eat well tend to have long-lasting energy. Energy is definitely something you need in school! You get up early every morning and have to learn all day long. Energy from food can really help you out. Instead of falling asleep at your desk, you’ll be awake and ready to learn. When you’re feeling good at school, you can focus better. Your mind might still wander sometimes in class, but it will be easier to pay attention to the teacher with a stomach full of good food.

“Brain Foods” Some foods are great for your brain! Eat them regularly and see if they make you any sharper. • Blueberries improve memory. Blue and purple fruits and vegetables in general are good for your brain. • Avocados have unsaturated fat in them, a healthy fat that keeps your brain healthy. • Salmon has a nutrient called omega-3 fatty acid, which improves focus and memory. • Nuts have all sorts of brain-boosting things in them. Walnuts are especially good at keeping your blood flow healthy, which in turn helps out your brain.

You Are How You Eat

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Nutrition and Your Future

Eating healthy food and exercising can help you feel better in body and mind. Some studies have shown that kids who make healthy food choices do better in school.

Scientists think good nutrition also improves memory, which is an important skill for school. Even if you can pay attention in class, you won’t do well on tests if you can’t remember what you need to know! Certain foods may help keep your brain healthy and active, so you can remember what you learn. Good nutrition is key for being successful in sports too. When you play sports, you burn up a lot of calories. You need to replace those calories so you don’t feel weak and sick. Athletes generally need more food than people who don’t play sports.

You Are How You Eat

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Whether you play in an after-school sports league or in the Olympics, athletes know that eating right and taking care of your body by choosing healthy foods is the best way to make sure you can give your all on the field.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Athletes who fill up on healthy foods (and not just chips and greasy hamburgers) can run faster, throw farther, and score more points. Good nutrition is important on and off the field. Your health right now depends partly on what you choose to eat. Just in case you need even more reasons, good nutrition today makes your future better. Eating right will keep you healthy both now and in years to come!

You Are How You Eat

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2 Your Future Health Y

our future health has a lot to do with how you’re living right now. The choices you make will make a difference in the future, even if that’s hard to picture. Exercising, going to the doctor, getting enough sleep, and eating right will all help you live a happy, healthy life in the future. Unfortunately, the opposite is true too. If you don’t take care of yourself now, you’ll have to deal with some health problems in the future. Poor nutrition can lead to lots of health problems years later. Then you’ll wish you ate better when you were younger!

Knowing how many calories you’re taking in and how many calories you’re burning each day is a big part of keeping extra weight off and staying as healthy as you can be.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Weight Gain Weight gain happens when people eat too many calories and don’t use them up with exercise. Lots of people eat way too much food every day. And they don’t exercise enough, so their bodies don’t use up all the calories they eat. Athletes might eat 3,000 calories or more when they’re playing sports, but they’re moving around so much they burn them all off. For everyone else, eating more than about 2,000 calories ends up packing on pounds. We have a couple different words for weighing too much. People who weigh a little too much are overweight. People who weigh a lot too much are obese. Both are unhealthy. Being too heavy doesn’t make someone ugly, bad, or stupid. It does mean he should consider losing weight for health reasons. Weighing too much causes all sorts of problems. Bones and joints have a hard time supporting extra body weight, and they can end up getting hurt. It’s hard to move around with extra weight. People who are overweight or obese are at more risk for heart disease, strokes, liver problems, some kinds of cancer, and more. All of those things can happen to people with healthy weights, but they happen to heavier people more often. Imagine carrying around a ten-pound weight all day and never being able to put it down. That’s what’s happening if you’re ten pounds overweight. Some people who weigh too much feel bad about their choices and how they look. Other people make fun of them or call them ugly. Overweight and obese people are more often sad than people who aren’t overweight or obese. Weighing too much is hard on emotional health. All this happens over time of course. You won’t eat a piece of cake and suddenly gain a hundred pounds. Over months and years, though, unhealthy eating choices lead to weight gain. And weight gain doesn’t just happen in the future, to people when they’re grown up. More and more kids are gaining too much weight. Overeating, junk food, and lack of exercise all lead to weight gain. Kids who eat too much start gaining weight when they are little. In fact, one out of three kids in the United States weighs too much. In other parts of the world, overweight children are becoming more common too.

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Food labels can help you find how much salt, sugar, and fat are in the foods you eat. Limiting the amount of unhealthy fats and salt in your diet is a great way to reduce your risk of health problems (like stroke, heart attack, and high blood pressure) later in life.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Choosing to eat too much and choosing unhealthy foods now may mean you’ll start to gain weight. Maybe you already have. If you’re concerned, go to your doctor and ask about your weight and eating habits. She can work with you to decide if you need to make any changes so that you can be fit and healthy for years to come.

Heart Problems Lots of unhealthy food choices lead to heart and artery problems. Eating too much of some nutrients can get in the way of a healthy heart. Eating too much sodium is one big problem. Sodium is a nutrient that comes mostly from salt. The saltiest foods are usually junk foods. So people who eat lots of junk foods and other salty foods are more at risk for heart disease. Too much salt causes high blood pressure, which is bad for the heart. When the body digests salt, some ends up in the blood. The salt makes the blood press against the arteries more than it should, which is high blood pressure. In the end, high blood pressure can cause heart attacks and other heart problems. Unhealthy fats also cause heart and artery problems. Fried foods, margarine, dairy, meat, and coconuts all have unhealthy fats, which are called saturated fats and trans fats. It’s okay to eat a little of them, but a lot of unhealthy fat is bad for your heart. Unhealthy fats also actually raise how much cholesterol is in the blood. More cholesterol ends up clogging arteries and causing heart attacks or strokes. Just being overweight or obese also leads What Does it to high blood pressure and heart problems. Mean to Be at Risk? People who weigh too much are more likely to have high blood pressure and to get When someone is at risk for a disheart attacks. Some foods have a nutrient ease, there is a higher chance she called cholesterol in them. Cholesterol does will get it. a lot of things to help the body work, like

Your Future Health

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What Are Cells? Cells are very small parts of the human body you can only see under a microscope. Everything in the body is made of special cells: the skin is made out of skin cells, your liver is made out of liver cells, and your blood is made out of blood cells. All living things have cells, not just humans.

What Is a Stroke?

protect cells. The body makes some of its own cholesterol, but we also get some cholesterol from food. Meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products have cholesterol in them. Too much cholesterol can backfire. It builds up in arteries and clogs them up. After awhile, the cholesterol can cause heart attacks because not enough blood is getting through the arteries to the heart. Clogged arteries can also cause a stroke.

Diabetes

Diabetes is in the news a lot these days. More and more people are getting the disease beWhen people say that someone cause of unhealthy eating and not getting had a stroke, they mean that the enough exercise. blood flow inside the person’s Diabetes is a disease in which the body brain was interrupted for some can’t deal with sugar the way it should. Usureason. When this happens, brain ally, our bodies can digest sugar and use it cells die. Afterward, the person to make energy. Then we use the energy to may not be able to speak or move move around. When someone has diabetes, normally. If too many brain cells her body can’t do that correctly. are killed, the person will die. Scientists don’t know exactly why, but diabetes is tied to weighing too much. People who are overweight or obese are much more likely to get the kind of diabetes called type 2 diabetes. Eating a lot of sugar might also lead to diabetes. People with diabetes have to watch what they eat and make sure they get enough exercise. They have to keep a close eye on their health. Over time, diabetes can cause all sorts of problems. Kidney disease, joint problems, heart disease, stroke, and blindness are all possibilities.

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Nutrition and Your Future

An Alternative Future Reading about all the health problems that might happen to you because of poor nutrition can be scary. Keep in mind, though, that just because you don’t eat healthy all the time doesn’t mean you will definitely get heart disease or diabetes. And the sooner you change, the better!

Facts from the American Diabetes Association Total: 25.8 million children and adults in the United States—8.3% of the population—have diabetes. Diagnosed: 18.8 million people Undiagnosed: 7.0 million people Prediabetes: 79 million people New Cases: 1.9 million new cases of diabetes are diagnosed in people aged 20 years and older in 2010. Under 20 years of age: 215,000, or 0.26% of all people in this age group have diabetes. About 1 in every 400 children and adolescents has diabetes.

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Making changes in the way you eat can be difficult if you don’t do all the cooking and shopping. Try getting your whole family involved in eating healthy foods. Making better food choices can be a lot easier when you’re making those choices with others.

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The really good news is you can stay away from all those problems just by making some changes in how you eat. You can avoid all those health problems by choosing to eat healthy food and eating the right amount of food. Even better, you can improve your life right now too! Eating better now will keep you healthy and strong in the future. Just like good nutrition makes you feel good and do your best right now, it will continue to help you out in the future.

Two Types of Diabetes Diabetes comes in two kinds: type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. The kind of diabetes people get from weighing too much is type 2 diabetes. Adults and kids can both get type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a little different. People get type 1 when they are young, and it has nothing to do with how much they weigh. People with type 1 diabetes have to really be careful about what they eat, and make sure they don’t eat too much or too little sugar. They also have to give themselves shots of something called insulin, which helps their bodies use sugar correctly.

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3 Making Good Choices Today S

ome people groan when they hear anything about healthy foods. Don’t they taste gross? Isn’t it boring and hard to eat healthy? Not at all! Not when you know a little bit about what healthy eating really is. Really, all it takes is a few simple good choices. Once you learn how to make those choices, healthy eating will become a normal—and delicious—part of your life!

Getting all the nutrients you need from food means eating a balanced diet of many different kinds of healthy food.

Remember the Basics

The guidelines for good nutrition aren’t really that hard to remember. You don’t need to memorize a million rules. You just need to keep a few guidelines in mind.

Fruits and Vegetables

Just about everybody can add more fruits and vegetables to their diets. The more you eat, the better! Remember, fruits and vegetables have a lot of good nutrients in them. Carrots have vitamin A, which helps you see well. Spinach has iron, which helps your blood carry oxygen and keeps you energized. Avocados have healthy unsaturated fats, which protect the heart. Do some more research, and you’ll find many more examples.

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Slip in fruits and veggies wherever you can. Add sliced fruit to your cereal in the morning. Add vegetables to your sandwich for lunch. Eat a fresh piece of fruit for a snack. Take an extra serving of vegetables at dinner.

Whole Grains

What Are Guidelines? Guidelines are pieces of advice. Nothing bad will happen if you don’t follow them all the time. Healthy eating guidelines are advice about how to eat so you’ll feel and be your best. If you don’t follow them 100 percent of the time, you won’t get punished.

You may already eat grains every day, or at least foods made out of grains. Flour is usually made out of wheat. And flour is in just about everything, including bread, cakes, crackers, and even soy sauce. Other grains you might know include rice, oats, barley, and quinoa. Not all grains have the same nutrition, though. Some grains are whole grains and are more nutritious. Each kind of grain is a different kind of seed from a grass plant. So every piece of rice is a seed from a rice plant. Every grain seed has three parts. Whole grains have all three parts, and all the good nutrients that are in each part. Lots of the grains we normally eat are refined grains, though. Refined grains are sent to factories, where they have two parts removed. Refined grains don’t have as many nutrients because they only have one part left. The way your body digests and uses refined grains is also not as healthy. Choose whole-grain products, like whole-wheat bread and brown rice. Oats are whole grains too. Make as many grains whole as possible. Then you’ll get as many nutrients as possible.

Eat from All Food Groups

We divide food up into different food groups: fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and protein. The dairy group includes milk, cheese, yogurt, and anything else made from animal milk. The protein group has foods that contain protein, like meat, beans, and nuts. Every food

Making Good Choices Today

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Eating a balanced diet is the best way to stay healthy. That means eating the right amount from each food group and not eating too much of any one kind of food. Remember, you should eat more fruits and vegetables than any other food group.

group is good for you in a different way, because the foods in them tend to have different nutrients. The protein group is good for, well, protein! You get a lot of calcium from the dairy group. You get carbohydrates from grains. All together, eating every food group gives you all the nutrients you need. Try to eat a lot of different foods. Make it a goal to eat at least three different food groups at every meal. For example, a bowl of oatmeal (grain) with bananas on top (fruit) and a glass of milk (dairy) covers three food groups.

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Limit Junk Food

Junk foods aren’t very healthy because they don’t have good nutrients in them. You won’t find many vitamins and minerals in junk foods like candy, chips, and cookies. What you will find is a lot of salt, sugar, and unhealthy fat. Too much of any of those nutrients will hurt your health over time. Junk foods also have a lot of calories. Calories themselves aren’t bad—they’re just the measure of how much energy a food has. We need calories to survive, but too many calories cause weight gain. The best calories are in foods with lots of good nutrients. Junk foods just have empty calories, which are calories without any of those nutrients. You’ll be fine if you eat junk foods once in a while. You don’t have to give them up entirely. Just try to limit them, and save them for special occasions rather than an everyday snack.

Don’t Eat Too Much

Finally, don’t eat too much! People eat a lot and end up gaining weight. Eating too much food is how people start putting on pounds.

Vegetarians Vegetarians are people who choose not to eat meat. Some vegetarians don’t think people should eat animals, or they don’t agree with how animals are raised for meat. Other vegetarians cut out meat for health reasons. Whatever their reasons, vegetarians can have healthy diets even though they don’t eat meat. There are lots of other sources of protein besides meat, like beans, tofu, nuts, and lentils. As long as vegetarians make sure they replace the nutrients they are missing by not eating meat, they’ll be just as healthy—or healthier—than meat eaters.

Making Good Choices Today

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Salty or sweet snacks are almost always high in calories. It can be hard to stick to eating just one serving of your favorite chip or cookie—but if you don’t, you’ll end up with extra, unhealthy calories.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Only eat when you are hungry. And don’t eat until you feel stuffed. Just eat until you feel a little full. Pay attention to what your body is telling you when you eat. When you’re serving yourself, give yourself as much food as you know you’ll eat. If you’re still hungry when you finish what’s on your plate, go back for more. Meals should be about 500 to 600 calories each. Keep snacks small. Eat full meals so that you’re not stuffing yourself between breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Don’t eat more than a couple snacks a day and keep them small. Don’t let yourself eat a whole bag of chips!

Small Steps Maybe healthy eating seems really overwhelming to you. How are you supposed to change your whole diet? You might want to give up before you even try. You don’t have to change everything all at once though! You should take small steps toward good nutrition. Every little change counts, and will add up to big changes over time. Instead of changing your whole way of eating, start with one small goal. Let’s say you drink a lot of soda all the time. A small goal could be drinking a glass of water instead of one soda a day. After you do that for a few days, you swap out another soda for a glass of water. The next step would be to drink only one or two sodas a week. Eventually, you could challenge yourself to only drink one soda a month. Other small step ideas include eating one more piece of fruit every day. Or skipping dessert once a week. Or adding vegetables to your pizza. Whatever you think you can do, start with that!

Make It a Habit At first, following all these guidelines might seem too hard. You’ll be tempted to eat cake for a snack instead of fruit. You’ll want to pig out at all-you-can-eat buffets. And you’ll still be able to make those kinds of choices—just not all the time. However, once you start trying to follow good nutrition guidelines, you’ll find healthy eating is pretty easy! After a while, healthy eating will become a habit.

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Eating in front of the TV isn’t a good idea. When you snack while watching your favorite show, you’re likely to eat more than you need.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Habits are things you do that you don’t really have to think about. You just do them automatically. You probably already have some habits. Habits can be healthy, like brushing your teeth. When you were little, your family always had to tell you to brush your teeth twice a day. Now you just do it automatically. Brushing your teeth isn’t hard, and it isn’t hard to remember because it’s a habit. Habits can also be less healthy. Playing video games and watching TV instead of getting exercise are unhealthy habits. You just come home from school and do them automatically. People have healthy and unhealthy food habits too. An unhealthy food habit is eating too many snacks sitting in front of the TV. You’re not paying attention to how much you’re eating, so you end up eating more than you need. You don’t think about whether or not snacking in front of the TV is a good idea. You just do it. A healthier food habit is eating a small snack after school every day, sitting at the table. Of course, it shouldn’t be junk food. You’ll be paying more attention to how much you’re eating, so you won’t eat too much. And you’ll be keeping yourself from getting hungry while still eating a healthy food. To make good eating habits you just have to make healthy food choices a whole bunch of times. Eat breakfast every day. Eat a little piece of chocolate for dessert after dinner instead of a bowl of ice cream. Choose fruits and vegetables for snacks instead of chips and cookies. At first, you might complain. But all you have to do is stick with it! Once you start eating breakfast, skipping dessert, and choosing healthy snacks, you won’t have to think about it as much. They’ll just become a normal part of your day—a habit!

Try New Things Healthy eating might be completely new to you. Or it might be something you and your family already think about. Either way, you can always challenge yourself to eat new things. You’ll end up eating even healthier, and finding new tasty food. “New things” doesn’t mean the new flavor of potato chips at the grocery store. “New things” means trying purple string beans or brown rice or starfruit.

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Keeping track of what you eat each day and how many calories you take in is a great way to make sure you’re not eating more than you need. Keeping a food diary can help you to see things you need to change about the way you eat, too.

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Nutrition and Your Future

Keeping an open mind about food makes healthy eating a lot easier. When you try a new vegetable, for example, don’t just automatically think you’ll hate it. Give it a chance! Take a bite. The worst that can happen is you don’t like it. But even if you think you don’t really like it, try it again sometime. People sometimes need to try a new food five or more times before they really start liking it. If you keep an open mind, you’ll discover all sorts of new healthy foods you like. You won’t be limited to one or two foods. Instead, a whole new world of food will open up! Healthy eating isn’t hard, but it takes some practice. Good nutrition is worth it, though. Not only will you feel better today but you’ll be taking care of your future too. Someday, you’ll thank yourself!

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Find Out More Online

BAM! Body and Mind www.cdc.gov/bam/nutrition/index.html KidsHealth: Staying Healthy www.kidshealth.org/kid/stay_healthy Smart Mouth www.cspinet.org/smartmouth

United States Department of Agriculture: Choose MyPlate www.choosemyplate.gov

In Books

Kajander, Rebecca and Timothy Culbert. Be Fit, Be Strong, Be You. Minneapolis, Minn. Free Spirit Publishing, 2010. Nissenberg, Sandra K. The Everything Kids’ Cookbook. Avon, Mass.: F+W Media, Inc., 2008. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat. New York: Penguin, 2009.

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Index athletes 21–23, 27 arteries 29–30

nutrients 12–13, 17, 29, 36–39 nutrition 7, 9–10, 12–13, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31, 33, 36–37, 41

blood pressure 28–29 overweight 27, 29–30 calories 7, 13, 16, 21, 26–27, 39–41, 44 cholesterol 29–30 dairy 12, 29–30, 37–38 dessert 41, 43 diabetes 10, 30–31, 33 diet 7, 11–14, 28, 36, 38, 41 doctor 7, 10, 25, 29 energy 13–15, 17, 19, 30, 39 exercise 7, 10, 27, 30, 43 fat 12–13, 16, 19, 28–29, 39 food groups 12, 37–38 fruits 7, 12, 19, 36–38, 43

portions 7, 13 protein 12, 37–39 refined grains 37 salt 13, 16, 28–29, 39 school 7, 15, 19, 21–22, 43, 48 scientists 7, 21, 30 sleep 10, 25 snacks 13, 40–41, 43 sugar 10, 12–13, 15–16, 28, 30, 33, 39 sports 6, 15, 21–22, 27 vegetables 7, 12, 19, 36–38, 41, 43 vegetarians 39

grains 7, 12, 37–38 heart 7, 10, 27–31, 36

weight 6, 10–13, 26–27, 29, 39 whole grains 7, 37

meals 7, 9, 13, 41 memory 19, 21 mood 6, 15, 17

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About the Author & Consultant Kyle A. Crockett is a freelance writer whose work can be found in print and online. His writing for young people has focused on topics ranging from health to economics. Dr. Borus graduated from the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed a residency in Pediatrics and then served as Chief Resident at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center before completing a fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is currently an attending physician in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Picture Credits Dreamstime.com: Andres Rodriguez: p. 32 Ariwasabi: p. 42 Danicek: p. 16 Dmitri Maruta: p. 26 Elizabetalexa: p. 38 Jakub Jirsák: p. 44 Julie Feinstein: p. 40 Monkey Business Images: p. 18 Peter Mautsch / Maranso Gmbh: p. 22 Petro Feketa: p. 14 Robyn Mackenzie: p. 36 Sonya Etchison: p. 8 Valeriy Lebedev: p. 33 Valeriya Potapova: p. 11 No Kid Hungry: p. 20 usda.gov: p. 28

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