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Nutrition Articles - The Key To A Healthy Life
This section of the web site features a number of nutrition articles. Why tell women over 40 about nutrition? Simple. Food provides the energy and nutrients you need to be healthy. Nutrients include proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals and water. Learning to eat nutritiously is not hard. The key is to:
How many people follow this simple diet plan? Not nearly enough, based upon the numbers of those with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol levels so high, medication to help lower it is being prescribed by doctor’s routinely now. So that's where my nutrition articles come in. Patient teaching or education is a large part of nursing duties. Personally it has been a major challenge in recent years. Not long ago, a pediatrician asked me to help with teaching a 12-year old girl about improving her diet because her cholesterol was significantly high and potentially dangerous. Trixie (not her real name) and I had a good rapport, until I mentioned her diet. Trixie’s diet had been filled with candy and junk food most of her young life. She was not alone. Two teens approached me and said “we need to lose weight, what can we do?”
When I tell patients they really do need to drink 6 to 8 glasses of water a day, they make awful faces at me. I don’t have the heart to tell them that they will also need to know where every restroom is located if going out. Back in the summer, I was pleasantly surprised to observe a neighbor serve her 2-year old and his friends a snack of fresh grapes and low-fat, sugar-free crackers and bottled water. When the kids played in a little pool, I noticed her son was lean and had a flat stomach. The other kids whom I know eat a lot of junk, had large stomachs. Just an observation. But I wondered, if only parents and caregivers could start kids on healthy diets at an early age. Is it hopeless? I sympathize with parents today. They have so many responsibilities and pressures. There are many parents who can barely take care of themselves, nutritionally. Case in point: I observed many times, the long drive-thru lines at any fast food restaurant, of adults buying a breakfast meal, every day. Later, I notice long lines at lunch time and dinner time. This food is packed with salt, sugar, and fat – also known as future high blood pressure, kidney disease, gall stone, diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity. Fast food has been changed into something that is no longer “real food”. Are we eating to live or living to eat? I’ve actually been told “well, we all have to die from something”, and “at least I’ll die happy”. This is ridiculous of course and hopefully it was said as a joke. In truth, I’ve worked with numerous patients who are suffering terribly due to so many years of stuffing their bodies with the wrong foods. It never gets easier to watch a human die slowly from something that could have been prevented, with the simple, healthy diet described above. I’ve decided to stop nagging people to improve their diets and change their eating habits. Instead, I will provide nutrition articles with true stories about the sad consequences of ignoring one’s health and nutrition. Below are the first of my nutrition articles. I will add more nutrition articles on a regular basis, so stay tuned!
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When I mentioned the above diet, they shrugged and frowned. They responded with something like “never mind”. They wanted a quick fix such as pills – the old “magic bullet”. 
