Wild, Wacky and Weird Nutrition Trivia

Posted 10/25/13 in [Nutrition "Nesaykwa"] | Comments Off on Wild, Wacky and Weird Nutrition Trivia

I admit it. I am a Nutrition Nerd. I really do think the way food interacts with our bodies is mysterious, marvelous, and miraculous. Every so often, I come across some trivia about food that makes me laugh with glee. And I write it down to keep, because it’s fabulous. And now you get to enjoy it as well:

• If you would like to know how long it takes for your food to go from one end to the other (transit time), you can eat some beets. When you see the red again, calculate the time from when you took your first bite. That’s your transit time. At least for beets.
• Termites, grubs, grasshoppers, ants and other insects are eaten by other cultures and are an excellent source of protein. They aren’t always eaten raw, though.
• Non-American food nutrition labels will have different items listed than what are on ours. European label list ingredients in percentages. Europeans also use the joule, rather than the calorie, to report the energy potential a food has.
• The stuff that leaves your stomach into the duodenum is called chyme.
• The word “duodenum” is generally pronounced dew-oh-dee-num by the British and do-ah-den-num by Americans. It is still the first part of the small intestine, no matter what.
• When you are healthy, even if you simply laid in bed and did nothing (no reading, watching TV, nothing), your body would still use 1400-1800 calories just to operate.
• The Hershey chocolate bar was advertised in the early 1900s as a health food. Also, that it kept children’s stomachs full so they wouldn’t want to eat as much.
• Cold cooked potatoes are actually harder to digest.
• The Chinese eat about 200 pounds/person of rice per year. Americans consume just over 50 pounds of bread.
• If a food is “enriched,” it lost nutrients when it was being processed and those nutrients were added back in after it was processed. If a food is “fortified,” it has had additional nutrients added to it.
• Fat is a food group, and your brain cannot function without it.
• An intensive body builder needs about 9000 calories per day.
• “Vegan” is pronounced vee-gan (hard “g,” as in “goat).
• “Kwashiorkor” (pronounced “kwa-shee-or-kor”) is a condition where there is enough food to prevent starvation, but the food is so low in protein that the body is at risk of death.
• Food in the US began to be enriched in the 1940s.
• Vitamins, minerals, and water are measured by how much they weigh.
• The lungs don’t create carbon dioxide. Red blood cells release their carbon dioxide when they are in the lungs and the lungs are the mechanism by which the accumulated carbon dioxide from the cells is gotten out.
• It is estimated 97% of the world’s oceans are unexplored. What foods are yet to be discovered?
• In Uganda, some street vendors sell small portions of sugar cane as a snack.
• Protein requires 7 times more water for metabolism than carbohydrates or fat.
• Most insulin that diabetics use is made from genetically engineered bacteria.
• The protein we eat in our diet is only one-third source of the protein our body uses. The rest of the protein is actually created by the amino acids absorbed from nutrient breakdown. This is why AminoCharge is such a powerful product.
• Vitamin D is technically a hormone.
• Early in the last century, Dr. Joseph Goldberger used the concept of good nutrition as a cure for pellegra, a disease which progresses to mental illness and death. The cure? Foods rich in niacin (vitamin B3). This was a radical approach in that it was previously thought to be a disease caused by germs.
• Unripe bananas are actually have a greater nutrient content to them than ripe bananas.
• If you use black pepper in any dish that you season with turmeric, it will greatly increase the benefits of the turmeric in your body.

What about other Nutrition Nerds out there? What fun things do you know?