Tara Stark's blog

Do you know where that burger came from? The meat? The bun? The pickle? Unless you are polishing off a Hundred Mile burger from the Hume Hotel in Nelson, chances are you would be hard pressed to come up with an answer. March is nutrition month and this year’s theme is “Celebrating Food from Field to Table”. This fantastic theme encourages us to contemplate such questions and explore our personal relationship with where our food comes from.

For many people holiday eating can be a source of stress. We love the season’s goodies, and yet we feel guilty about indulging; concerned about health repercussions of eating rich foods and the possibility of gaining weight.

It’s the season for winter squash and there are plenty of good reasons to include it on your Thanksgiving table. Squash is a source of beta carotene which is a phytochemical that belongs to the carotenoid family, a group of pigments responsible for the red, orange and yellow colours of many fruits and vegetables. The deeper the orange colour, the more beta carotene present –which puts pumpkins up there with carrots and sweet potatoes as some of the best food sources of beta carotene.

Kids love cereal and adults love quick easy and no fuss meals for their kids. Served with milk, or a milk alternate like fortified soy milk, cereal is a great way to get calcium and vitamin D. Choose a nutritious cereal, and it can also be a good source of fibre as well as vitamins and minerals like B vitamins, iron and zinc. Unfortunately the least nutritious cereals on the market have the most nutrition claims, and are heavily marketed to kids. Even the ‘healthy looking’ cereals can be high in added sugar and salt, so it is important to read labels and choose wisely.

Moving toward a vegetarian diet is the most powerful food choice we can make to reduce climate change. It is estimated that livestock production creates more greenhouse gasses than all forms of transport combined. Nutritionally, eating a plant based diet is good for us too. Plant based protein sources include beans and legumes, nuts, and seeds and grains. Vegetarians and vegans have lower rates of many diseases including obesity, heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and hypertension.

Iron needs vary throughout a woman’s lifespan, but from the onset of menstruation, until menopause, women’s iron needs are significantly higher than men’s. Female endurance athletes, pregnant women, vegetarian women and vegetarian adolescents have the highest iron needs of all, and are at the highest risk for iron deficiency. Iron is needed for the body to produce hemoglobin, a substance in red blood cells that enables them to carry oxygen. Iron deficiency can leave people feeling tired and weak.

According to the American Heart Association, the amount of sugar in just one can of Coke is more sugar than an average man or woman should ingest in a day. A coke has 10 teaspoons of sugar in it. A teaspoon of sugar has 4 grams of sugar in it, so a coke has about 40 grams of sugar in it. Added sugar is associated with obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Do you work hard to pack a healthy lunch only to arrive at work to find doughnuts in the staff room? You have plenty of food in your lunch, you don’t need to grab a doughnut but every time you walk by the door, there they are, calling to you with their delicious frosted tops.

Need a good nutrition boost to keep you energized during these drab days? Go get yourself some sprouts. Pile them into your favorite sandwich or on top of a salad; these little nutrient powerhouses are available locally year-round, are fresh and delicious and are brimming with nutrients. Sprouts are seeds that have been soaked and rinsed a number of times until they germinate, or sprout. Some sprouts are eaten as soon as they germinate and others are best once they have grown a little plant.

Many vitamins and minerals play a role in the body’s immune response, so eating a varied nutrient dense diet can be a good line of defense against getting sick. But what should you eat if you get the flu? Most of the time, people’s appetite lessens when they have a flu, especially if they experience fever and nausea. This may be where the expression “feed a cold and starve a fever” came from.