Minerals For Weight Loss
Minerals are required for many body processes, including making and maintaining bones and soft tissues, keeping the nervous system in operation, and clotting blood. Unlike vitamins, some of which are made by the body, minerals must be supplied by foods or as supplements.
Essential minerals are calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, iodine, potassium, copper, cobalt, manganese, fluorine, and zinc. You need traces of other minerals as well.
How to read a food label
By law, all packaged and prepared foods must carry nutritional labeling, but how many people actually read the labels? There’s a whole lot of valuable information to be found there. Lets look at the label on a box of cookies, for example.
Serving size: If you think an entire box of cookies is a serving, the label will set you straight. A serving, in this case, is three cookies, for a total of 180 calories. If you can eat just one, you’ve swallowed 60 calories. If you eat all 15, you’ve scarfed down 900 calories.
Fat facts: If you look hard enough, you’ll find a lot of information. “Calories from fat” tells you that, in this case, fully half of each serving is fat. Next, look at the heading “Total Fat.” There are 10 grams per serving. Remember: We’re talking about three cookies, not one and certainly not all 15. At 9 calories per gram, that ought to add up to 90 calories. . . yes, that checks out with “calories from fat.” But what kind of fat is it? Three types are represented here: saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated. What about trans fats? These “stealth fats” aren’t mentioned by name, but you can do a little math and figure it out:
If total fat is 10 grams, but the sum of the fats listed is 9.5 grams, 0.5 grams are trans fats.
Finally, three cookies contain 10 mg of cholesterol, 3 percent of the maximum you should take in daily.
But, wait, there are more fat facts on the label. Look down at the ingredients and see how many sources of fat you can find there. The obvious ones are the oils: soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola oils. But before you celebrate their being unsaturated vegetable oils, notice the words “partially hydrogenated.” This is the source of the trans fats. Can you find other fats in the ingredients? There’s the cocoa butter in the chocolate. And the fat in whole eggs. No wonder half the calories come from fat!
Other nutrients: Between the flour and the sugars they are made with, cookies are mainly carbohydrates - 21 grams in all. The label specifies the amount of sugars and fiber, because these are considered most important from the point of view of health, but the two won’t add up to the total carbs. The rest are complex carbohydrates. Even so, 11 grams of sugar is an awful lot. Remember: Sugar is at the top of the pyramid, in the “eat sparingly” department.
Protein is listed, though in the case of cookies, this is a paltry amount. On other food labels, protein might playa bigger part.
More on ingredients: The earlier in the list an ingredient appears, the more (by weight) there is of it. There are many loopholes to this rule, and manufacturers take advantage of every one. For example, they use a lot of different kinds of sugar. Since each one represents only a very small amount by weight, various sugars can hide toward the end of the ingredients list. To paraphrase the poet, “A sugar by any other name is just as sweet,” and still a sugar. Here are some of the aliases sugar goes by: brown sugar
corn sweetener
corn syrup
fructose
fruit juice concentrate
glucose
dextrose
high-fructose corn syrup
honey
invert sugar
lactose
maltose
molasses
raw sugar
sucrose
syrup
Because sugar is a carbohydrate, every gram contains 4 calories , no matter what name it travels under. So be as aware of “stealth” sugars as you are of “stealth” fats.
Do yourself a favor and become an avid label reader. You can learn a lot about how much of what is in the food you eat.
About the author
and Bonus Recipe Books, offers the latest developments on holistic cures, practical nutrition tips, and useful information on weight loss, health problems and how to use Tahitian Noni Juice in preparing your meals.Tags: body processes, calcium, calories, cholesterol, cobalt, essential minerals, how to read a food label, iodine, manganese, monounsaturated, nervous system, nutritional labeling, phosphorus, potassium, serving size, soft tissues, stealth, trans fats, whole lot, zinc
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