BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay

Proper nutrition is one of the most essential elements to being healthy and living a long life. People deal with food every day, and food has been a part of life since the beginning of civilization. What we eat becomes our diet, and our diet plays a major role in deciding how healthy we are and how well our body functions. Without proper diet, our body cannot carry out the functions it needs to perform. Most people have some common knowledge on what is good and what is bad for the human body to consume. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains are some common items people think of when they think of healthy foods. BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay However, it is not enough just to know what foods are good for your body, it is also important to understand why certain foods are…show more content…

ORDER  HERE A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

These include obesity, diabetes, and several heart conditions. Obesity is the term used for someone who qualifies as significantly overweight. A BMI (Body Mass Index) records weight in relation to height. A BMI of 25 is overweight and a BMI of 30 is obese. Obesity is not a disease in its self but it can lead to different health issues, some fatal. Obesity can be related to eighty percent of type two diabetes, seventy percent of cardiovascular disease, thirty percent to gall bladder surgeries, and forty two percent to breast and colon cancer. Unfortunately, obesity rates in people are rising rapidly. The United States alone had an obesity rate of twenty six percent in 2007. Some cases of obesity are gene related, but most other cases are a result of improper dieting and exercise among the individual (“Why Is Proper Nutrition Important?”, Case Western Reserve University). Type II diabetes is another major effect from improper diet and nutrition.BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay

Introduction The most important health issue in today’s society is that of food-borne illness. However, with an annual increase of these pathogenic bacteria popularly known as food-borne illness which results to death, researchers have traced the cause to the intake of contaminated foods. In today’s society, the foundation of a healthy lifestyle is the sort of food consumed, the nutritional content and the physical fitness that food does to the human system. In essence, food is needed in the human system for growth and development, for the sustenance of life, and nourishment of the body. With all this essential facts on food, we can now conclude that good nutrition is needed for good functioning of the human organism and cells…show more content…
Simultaneously, new information is exploding on the quantity and quality of foods and nutrients needed for optimal health. Common safety issues related to food purchase, storage, and preparation: The issue of food safety varies from the purchase, storage and preparation perspective. In the purchasing of food, the issue of the date of expiration of the food (canned food) and the damage in the packaging as well as freshness and handling of the food must be considered and viewed properly. The storage involves the temperature at which the food is preserved and consumed, while the preparation involves the cleanliness of the utensils in addition to the process of cooking the meal (hygiene). The optional method for certifying the safety of food includes a clean preparation environment and the separating of unlike foods.BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay

1. Introduction
Food chemistry is important in food science because it gives a better understanding of food, it allows to create better food through applying science and technology. It also explains food safety, healthfulness, quality, cost, if it is convenient and the diversity of the products.
Food chemisrty involves the application of biochemistry, organic, pchem and analytical chemistry to improve the understanding and manipulation of foods and their components.
The importance of food chemistry is to ensure food quality, nutrition and safety.
Food is created in two methods: the traditional method and technology method. The advantages of using technology to make food are: save time, cost, more production, better appearance
The process of making food goes through a hierarchical structure that include ingredients (water, carbs, proteins, lipids, mineral ect) which are in the molecular level; the is the process to make the product where from the molecular structure, it goes to structural where the actual food is made and physicochemical. This includes molecular organization, structure formations and forces involved. The last process is the quality of the food which includes the taste, texture, appearance, shelf life and nutrition.BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay
Food architectural includes:
Function: nutrition, it is healthy or not and it is good for the lifestyle
Aesthetics: appearance, texture, flavor and shelf life
Constraints: it is legal to sell, it is economically for the company producing it and for consummators, how long it needs to be produced and stay in stores, and the context of it ingredients.
The building materials are: phases ( oil, water, air), biopolymers (peptides, proteins, oligosaccharides, polysaccharide), particles (droplets, bubbles, crystals, complexes), biological objects (cells, granules, fibers), association colloids (micelles, vesicles, bilayers)
Food is prepared by intermolecular and colloidal interactions such as:
Covalent bonds – chemical bond that involves the sharing of electron pairs between atoms. It is affected by electronegativity of the connected atoms. Two atom with equal electronegativity makes nonpolar covalent bond; unequal relationship creates polar covalent bonds.
Electrostatic interactions – the electric force between two charged objects. Opposite charges attract.
Salt bridge – noncovalent interactions. It’s a combination of hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions.
Hygrogen bonding – electrostatic interaction between polar molecules that occurs when a hydrogen atom bound to highly electronegative atom.
Hydrophobic attraction – the tendency of nonpolar molecules to aggregate in aqueous solutions and water molecules. This attraction is water fearing.
VDW attraction – it’s an electrostatic attraction between opposite charges. It is a weak force of attraction.

Molecular characteristics include: size, shape, charge, polarity, rigidity/flexibility, interactions and reactivity.
Electrostatic interactions – includes ions and dipoles; are attractive/repulsive attractions; vary from short – long range and weak to strong.BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you’re probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety. BIOL 2320 – Nutritional Science Essay