My name is Jeffrey and I'm currently a 3rd year college student trying to get a degree in Health Science. I'm taking KIN 140 because I'm really interested in health related topics. As a result, I wanted to learn about the dangers of having an unhealthy diet and the benefits of having a healthy diet. By doing these blog posts, I hope to achieve a better understanding through the research of the impacts of diet in general. Additionally, I want to share my own personal opinions and knowledge through these blogs. Thus, my blogs are directed towards anyone who has an interest in learning about the potential benefits and harm of a healthy and unhealthy diet. Technically, I will make my blogs as simple as possible so that anyone can read and understand my posts. So I hope you'll be interested to stick around!
I personally believe that diet is an important issue for everyone of all ages. This is because the choices we make, with regard to our diet, will have short and long term consequences/benefits later on in life. Currently, chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases contributes to a lot of the mortality here in North America. Even though there are a lot of factors that contribute to those chronic diseases; I believe that diet is an important contributor. To put it simply: everyone eats food! 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, and throughout our lives. As a result, it is important to make people aware of what they are putting in their bodies.
For my first blog, I would like to focus on "Sodium", which is an essential nutrient we take in our diet on a regular basis. The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about sodium is usually sodium chloride (AKA: table salt)
So is it good or bad for us? Well...on one hand, as an "essential" nutrient, we need to obtain sodium in our diet for our body to function normally. This includes the regulation of our body fluids such as water distribution and blood pressure (Insel et al., 2011). On the other hand, health problems arise from excess consumption of sodium in our diet.
So the answer to this blog should be clear that sodium is good AND bad for us depending on how much you consume. However, sodium deficiency is really rare in the western diet, so I will focus on the other side of the spectrum, which is excess sodium intake. American Heart Association states that the recommended daily intake of sodium should not exceed 2300mg. Compared to Canada, Health Canada recommends 1500mg of sodium a day. However, on average, people (Canadians & Americans) ingest around 3400-4000mg of sodium in ONE DAY!! As you can see, this is really problematic and could put a lot of strain on the cardiovascular system. Studies have shown that high sodium intake can lead to hypertension, stroke, renal disease, and other cardiovascular diseases (Barr, 2009). Moreover, sodium is often referred to as the "Silent Killer" because the symptoms of excessive sodium intake often occurs later on in life and is hard to detect before it is too late.
In my opinion, excessive sodium intake is a problem that is rooted more within the food industry than in ones behavior (as I will be talking about in blog 3). If you payed close attention to the nutrition labels on the foods that you eat. You'll soon notice that a lot of the foods contain A LOT of sodium with a SMALL amount of serving size. It should be noted that foods that don't taste salty can contain a lot of sodium as well.(For example, Bread and Cereal, etc..)
In conclusion, my take home message for you is to be more cautious about what you eat and try to read and compare the nutrition labels before you purchase something.
References:
Barr, S.I. (2009). Reducing dietary sodium intake: the canadian context. Appl. Physiol. Nutr. Metab., 35(1-8), Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=ba3940eb-2aa8-4ac7-bc3e-ba0595bf05a2%40sessionmgr14&vid=4&hid=12
Insel, P., Ross, D., McMahon, K., & Bernstein, M. (2011). Nutrition. United States of America: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, LLC.
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