Nutrition 911: The Emergency Course On What To Eat

Here’s a Straight Dope for your reference files. I wrote this series of articles a few years back and have been tinkering with it since. Next year I’d like to turn it into a book, so any and all thoughts and ideas you have are appreciated.

The gist of this series came about as we were helping people on the Message Boards and realized that worrying about glycemic index or ketosis was a waste of time if you didn’t know the difference between proteins and fats. As it turns out, most people over think their diets and need to revert to square one. This, of course, is because most of us learn about nutrition through the media instead of school. That's why we think "no fat" is good and only vitamins we need are the "8 essential" ones in Pop Tarts. Then we get even crazier notions; like we’re fat because we didn’t realize that carrots were high in the GI scale, or because cortisol's been attacking our belly, or that our macronutrient ranges is off 5%, and not because we sit on our asses all day and eat fast food. And since schools have mostly 86’d their nutrition programs (probably to keep kids from rioting when they learned what the school was feeding them) we needed to begin our education from a much more remedial place.

The basic concept is this: it doesn’t do you any good to listen to some doctor yammer on about the differences between docosahexaenoic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid if we don’t know the difference between salmon and flaxseed. So that's where this series starts, with the basics of nutrition that you're faced with every day. It's not nutrition for dummies; it's nutrition for the uninformed and the misinformed. No math, not a lot of science, just the facts to the best of my understanding.

This is not the complete series that will be in the book, nor the order, but I'd like to get your thoughts and critiques on layout nonetheless.

Note: it's important to understand that nutrition, like all science, changes over time by definition. As studies shed light on new hypothesis' the field changes. Science, however, generally changes very slowly. Laws change faster and informing people how to eat requires helping them sift through marketing BS. So by the time you read this some information could be out of date, but it should still be relevant to how you think about eating.

Nutrition 911: Here's the straight 411, so you can avoid a dietary 911

Part II: What to Eat

Part III: Deciphering Marketing Jargon

Part IV: What "Fat Free" and "Low Carb" Really Mean

Part V: 5 Quick Steps to Mastering Food Labels

Part VI: Sweeteners

Part VII: Sugar vs. Fat: Which Is Worse?

Part VIII: The Worst Food in the World

IX: 10 Reasons to Drink Water

X: What's in Your Water?

XI: Coffee, Tea, and Caffeine

XII: Jumbo Juices and Crappuccinos

XIII: Juice, Juicing, and Fruit – The Differences

XIV: Energy Drinks – Do They Really Give You Wings?

XV The Best & Worst Cocktails

XVI To Fast Or Not To Fast?

XVII The Best Food On The Planet

XVIII Nutrient Timing: What and When You Should Eat

XIX: Supps, Drugs, and Rock and Roll