Nutrition and Digestion

Having good nutrition is an important part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle for kids, adolescents, and adults. Good nutrition is more than just “eating healthy” – it involves understanding how food gets processed in the body, why water is important for our cells, and how different foods impact the digestive system.

Notes: The SCIENCE team acknowledges that nutrition is a determinant of health and that environmental factors play a role in nutrition-related healthy behaviors, compounded by social and individual factors—gender, age, race and ethnicity, education level, socioeconomic status, and disability status—that influence nutrition, physical activity, and obesity. Therefore, the goals of the Nutrition Module are to investigate what happens in our bodies when we eat food and drink water – not promote any choices related to diet or weight change. We refrain from labeling anything (i.e. soda) as “bad” or “good” – we encourage you to try to do the same. We also know kids don’t live in a bubble. If anxiety surrounds dieting and diet culture, here are some resources to use, adapt, or ignore as applicable to your audience:

• Read Her Body Can, a book about body positivity (read aloud here)

• Gather magazines or newspapers and discuss the photos that are included. Analyze advertisements for diets and assess the messages the companies are sending.

Nutrition

When we eat, we are not only feeding ourselves, but also the ‘microbiome’ in our intestinal tracts. Our microbiomes are made up of trillions of microorganisms including thousands of different species (like bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses). In a healthy person, all of these tiny pieces coexist peacefully throughout the body but mostly in the intestines. Everybody’s microbiome has a unique makeup based on what they’ve been exposed to throughout their life. The microorganisms within our microbiomes help stimulate the immune system, break down potentially toxic food compounds, and capture certain vitamins and minerals. Sugars are absorbed quickly in the upper part of the small intestine. Complex carbohydrates like starch and fiber are not as easily digested, so they travel to the large intestine. So, when we think about what happens when we eat, we can think about how certain foods affect our biome!

General nutrition facts:

• Good nutrition requires a combination of a healthy diet, hydrating with fluids, and physical exercise.

• A well-balanced diet gives you the vitamins, minerals, nutrients, fiber, and water your body needs.

• Very few Americans get enough servings of fruits and vegetables. A Healthy Eating Plate suggests that we eat twice as many servings of these plant foods as servings of whole grains and healthy proteins.

• Food labels provide important information on what exactly is inside the food. Whole plant foods don’t have labels but are naturally packaged with vitamins, minerals, nutrients, fiber and water. Food labels only give information for one serving size. Not every package only has one serving size! This information tells us how many calories are in a serving of food and how many servings are in a package. For more information regarding how to read a food label, please visit the following FDA link.

• Calories are energy that fuels our body. If we eat too many calories without burning them as fuel, we can gain weight. This linkdescribes it well.

• An easy way to balance calories in and out during the day is to get 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise (e.g. brisk walk) each day and to choose water or milk instead of soda (including diet), juice, or energy drinks. Remember to listen to your body and rest between workouts.