Nutrition For Excellent Health

Princeton has a staff dietician, Victoria Rosenfeld, who helps student athletes feed themselves for top performance and also works with students who have eating disorders. She agreed to come and talk to a group of us at lunch today about "nutrition for excellent health".

The conversation was rich with useful and inspiring material. Here are just a few of her points:

 * We live in an environment that promotes being un-well. Dieting alone tends to be an abysmal failure. Only 1 - 2% of people tend to succeed at sustaining diets through discipline alone. You must change your environment to be successful.

* Next to rats, humans are the least selective animals on the planet regarding what we will eat.  We are hard-wired to eat. Calorie-restriction alone leads to: increased hunger, reduced Resting Metabolic Rate, decreased satiety, increased muscle loss.

* Food of any and all kinds is negotiable. Exercise is not. You must move every day in a variety of ways. Going to a gym or doing a fitness program is great. But that alone cannot overcome a day of sedentary work. You need to find ways to walk, climb, carry, lift, ask your body to work in ways that it is designed to every day. Exercise is an appetite regulator and helps improve mood.

* Non-organic veggies  are fine. Don't bother with organic fruits that have a peel you remove. It is vastly healthier to eat lots of veggies regardless of non-organic source than to forgo veggies because they're not organic.

* Everything you eat must be food first. Treats are fine and appropriate, but they should be made from good quality ingredients, not factory-processed junk. Grandma's chocolate cake: Yes, occasionally. Fruity Choc-O Pebbles: Not food (maybe possible if you recognize it as dessert, not breakfast).

* Join a CSA! Two in our area are: Chickadee Creek Farm and Honeybrook Organic Farm.

* Total calories in a week matter. Caloires in vs. calories burned matters. Don't obsess about calories per day. Only if you are really training hard as an athlete (> 1 hour per day) do you need to be concerned with timing of food for recovery and top performance. Skip all junk like energy bars and Gatorade except for rare and specific purposes such as training extremely hard in high heat -- where extra electrolytes and calories matter. A 250 calorie Cliff Bar may add more calories than your workout burned.

* Your plate should look like this. The entree that includes protein might be 4 oz. (like a deck of playing cards), not a lot more. 2 servings of "better grains and starches" per day. 2-3 fruits per day, not more due to calories and sugar content.