User:HealthCareDude/Nutrition Guide for Canadian

We as human consume food everyday to sustain life; in fact, all living organism needs to consume food to live. Therefore, food is important!

This article is created to provide a comprehensive nutritional guideline to Canadian exclusively as it specifies some food and businesses for Canadian market. However, viewer from different countries are welcomed to read as the article also provides science-based guidelines for those who are looking to learn more about nutrition. Now, lets dive into this article which comprises of 4 main topics: What is nutrition, How to create a nutritional plan, How to implement the nutritional plan, and How to maintain the nutritional plan.

What is nutrition?
We all know to eat when we're hungry, but why? Perhaps our body has done phenomenal job in taking charge of the rest after swallowing. So, to understand nutrition, we must first understand how the process works in our body by introducing two systems known as the Digestive and Excretory Systems. Once understood, you will be introduced to nutrition and components nutrition in food.

Digestive system
The human digestive system contains of seven main parts from the top to bottom: mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine (colon), rectum, and anus. There are other organs that also aid in the process of digestion as well.

The digestive system starts when we see or smell the food which secrete the gastric glands. Once food is put into the mouth, it was chewed, and then swallowed and passed to the esophagus into the stomach. At this stage, the stomach is a highly acidic environment which helps to kill the bacteria and breakdown the food into smaller pieces for absorption once food is passed into the small intestine. Inside the intestine, enzymes and chyme help with the absorption of nutrition through a group of tissue called villi. Villi are finger-like shapes and around 1 mm located inside the small intestine to absorb the nutrient. Once absorbed, water soluble nutrition move directly to cell from the capillaries while fat soluble nutrition is stored in the liver.

Then, food is passed to the large colon for final absorption stage. Once done, the byproduct (stool) is stored in the rectum ready for excretion via the anus.

Excretory system
The excretory system contains the major organ kidney and is responsible for filtering waste or excess substance in the body and help to maintain homeostasis. With this and the digestive system, they are responsible for bringing the food into your body, absorb the nutrition, and excrete it.

As you can see, this is an overview of how human body absorbs food. Now lets explore what is inside food at the molecular level to understand how human body transforms it into nutrition.

Nutrition
Nutrition refers to the substance our body convert from food in order to fuel itself. There are 6 classes of essential nutrition which are: protein carbohydrate, fat, minerals, vitamins, and water. These classes are further divided into macronutrients which are carbohydrate, fat, and protein and micronutrient which are minerals and vitamins. Now, lets take a look closer at each class of essential nutrition.

Macronutrient
Protein form important part of the bone, muscle, blood, enzymes, some hormones, and cell membrane; repair tissue; regulate water and pH balance; help in growth, and supply energy. Protein composes of 20 common amino acid and nine of them are essential (which means the body can not produce by itself). As long as nine essential amino acids are present, the body can produce the remaining 11 amino acids.

Carbohydrate plays a key role in supplying energy to cells in brain, nervous system, and blood as well as muscles during exercise. Carbohydrate can be broken down into simple sugar a.k.a. monosaccharides (glucose which is commonly found in plants and animals for energy, fructose which is found in fruit, and galactose which is found in dairy). A pair of single sugars is called disaccharides and complex carbs is divided into starches and fiber.

A little bit about fiber: fiber is nondigestible and it just moves through the gastrointestinal tract and provides bulk for feces; it also help to break down bacteria into acids and gases. There are two types of fibers; dietary fibers includes soluble and insoluble which help with slow digestion. Functional fibers refers to humanmade-type of fiber.

Fat helps to cushion the organs in the body and also supply energy during the resting period. Omega-3 is important for brain health.

Micronutrient
Minerals are inorganic (non-carbon-containing) elements which help to regulate body functions, aid in growth and maintenance of body tissue, and help release energy.

Vitamin are organic (carbon-containing) elements which help to speed up and regulate within living cells. Vitamin contains soluble and water-soluble vitamins. Vitamin D for further reference.

= How to create a nutritional plan? = No matter who you are, what you do. Having a practical nutrition plan is essential to maintain optimal level of overall health and wellness which eventually let you do anything you like. As we know, access to food has changed for the past decades from growing food as a farmer to ordering online grocery and even cell-based food diet. What that means is some people eat food from what they grow (farmer); on the other hand, some people eat cell-based food (synthesized food from the lab); therefore, nutritional plan should match with people from any situations to ensure the nutritional intake that the body deserves to get.

To achieve this, the plan is divided into three stages: beginner, intermediate, and advance. Now, lets dive into each stage:

Beginner
At beginner level, we aim to increase the intake of nutritious food and reduce unhealthy food while achieving recommend calorie and macronutrient intake. Please refer to this link for interactive nutrition content of the first tab. The second tab of the table is for calorie reference or you can use calorie data bank app such as Cronometer. If you have completed your macronutrient dietary intake, you're probably having an idea of the amount of carb, fats, and protein you need to consume.

Once you are able to identify how much macronutrient need to be taken, there are three possibilities, either you need increase, decrease, or maintain the level of calorie. If you need to increase, please refer to third (3) paragraph; if you need to decrease, please refer to fourth (4) paragraph. If you have already been able to achieve your level of calorie, please refer to the next stage: intermediate. Please keep in mind that our goal also focuses on increasing the percentage of nutrient-dense food intake; therefore, this will play an important role in choosing which type of food to consume.

(3) Normally, those who need to increase their level of calorie intake are skinny people or people who is working to become more athletic and stronger. To gain weight, the amount of calorie input must be higher than the amount of calorie output and these calories are obtained from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. At this level, it is important to be physically and mentally active to burn a lot of calorie in order to be hungry to eat nutrient-dense food.

(4) On the other hand, those who need to decrease their level of calorie intake are overweight or people who have underlying chronic disease and weight loss is beneficial to help them control the disease. It is important to lose weight SLOWLY and eat more the right amount of food (not less). The weight that you should focus on losing is called the non-essential body fat; and fat free mass should be kept to maintain body normal function. The amount of calorie being cut should be the same as recommended allowance intake; at this stage, you can start eating more protein and carb while reducing the intake of fat slowly until you start noticing reduction in body fat weight (especially in the belly area). The strategy here is to be physically and mentally active to burn a lot of calorie and eat nutrient-dense food.

Normally easier said than done, the next question is how to actually achieve this level of new energy requirement? It does not matter if you are trying to increase or cut back on calorie amount, the below recommendation will apply to both:


 * Burn enough calorie: Burning calorie involves exercise and doing physically and mentally draining work. Please note that this merely does not just reflect the number of calorie burn but is fundamental to your body's physiology. Our body needs to be constantly moving and thinking (as well as learning, memorizing, creating, analyzing, etc...) in order to generate new reactions and change every day. For more information, please refer to physical activity for more information. Therefore, if you are working a desk-office job, then it is mentally active; in that case, think of what can you do to make it more physically active; perhaps if you are a software engineer, you can try to stand and present whenever having a meeting with client or stakeholders. Furthermore, you can try to take client/colleagues to sport activity like golfing, tennis game, or outdoor event to talk business. In addition to this, you can try to attend sports with family during weekend.
 * Eat enough nutrient-dense food: The outer layer and texture of food is created just to fool you its nutritional content. Therefore, once food is passed into your esophagus, then the real game happens. Two main issues are discussed in this topics: How to know what to eat and how to eat a lot of those somewhat not delicious food. For the first issue, as we are focusing on macronutrient, therefore, you can take a look at this at all food labels for packaged food and refer to the third tab of the sheet to for nutritional content of food with no label. For the second issue, the simplest answer is to not cook at all. In fact, most vegetable and fruit do not require further processing which means that it can eaten raw. For meat and other products, you simply just need to heat it up to the desired temperature to kill bacteria and enough for our body to breakdown the food, then that's all you need to cook. I get it that this is not delicious; therefore, you can try different methods such as adding herbs and spices, be physically active so that you're hungry, or eat with friends.

Having a connection with food
Each food is delicious in its own unique flavor. Therefore, to be able to sustain a healthy diet, immerse yourself in the food farming process. A delicious healthy meal is not a meal full of sauces and preparation process but a meal that come from food which have been planted by efforts and passion. It is a hard process, but by gradually, slowly changing your dietary pattern, you will be able to have a better relationship with food and enjoy super healthy meal everyday which your body/organs/tissues/cells could not ask for anything better. With that said, next time when you go grocery or take a bite, think of how this food was grown, farmed, and look at its nutritional content (which can be reference on tab 3 of the MACRONUTRIENT DIETARY GUIDELINE worksheet or other nutrition data dataset such as Smartlabel. For more specific number, you can consider send the food for nutrition analysis such as Intertek.

There are multiple interesting ways to get to know more about food such as:


 * Grow yourself as it is relatively easy. The 5 fundamental resources to grow food are water, climate, sunlight, soil, and seeds.
 * Watch video of how farmers grow their crops, one good example is from Spencer Hilbert channel.
 * Visit local farms such as Robintide farms or visit Ontario Farm Search

Intermediate
At intermediate level, we aim to maintain all standards in the beginner level plus micronutrient & other nutrition substance intake.

Once meeting macronutrient goal and eating the right nutritious dense food is an easy task. You can now move on to this level.

At this level, what you're trying to do is to give the body the right chemical substances and molecules (or simply give it nutritional content at mg and microgram level) which it needs to function smoothly and achieve optimal nutrition level. The main topics we will be focusing on are minerals, vitamins, and other substances. We'll dive deep into each topic:

Advance
At advance level, we aim to maintain all standards in the intermediate level plus the impact of different food to human body at a molecular level.

= Further note = Largest Canadian Food Retailers: Loblaw, Sobeys Inc., Metro Inc. - To invest on this (on Thursday).

Global food production in a glance.; Canadian agriculture overview.

IMPROVING NUTRITION THROUGH AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SYSTEMS - More complex guide.

Further resources for Natural Health research
Licensed Natural Health Products Database (LNHPD) - Canada.ca

Natural health products - Canada.ca

Natural Health Products Regulations (justice.gc.ca)

Guidance Documents – Legislation and guidelines – Natural health products - Canada.ca

Nutrition Guideline: Natural Health Products (albertahealthservices.ca)

Quality of Natural Health Products Guide - Canada.ca

Books - Herb and Dietary Supplement Information - Research Guides at Harvard Library

Consumer/Patient Information - Herb and Dietary Supplement Information - Research Guides at Harvard Library

Herbs in Pediatrics Brief List of Information Resources (harvard.edu)

= Reference =