Hi Vox, welcome to this video on diet and nutrition. So this one will go well with the energy expenditure video but it's best to watch this one first because this one covers all the key theory. First of all then, what is a balanced diet? Well you've probably heard these stats flying around that males should eat 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day, women should eat around about 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day. You know it's not far from the truth those stats but what were...
mainly interested in is of the calories that you should eat, because obviously if you're an athlete you need to eat more calories. If you live quite a sedentary lifestyle and you don't do very much you'll need to eat fewer calories to make sure you get your body weight right. What we're more interested in to balance that is where should those calories come from and what you've got here is you've probably seen these at school and in doctor's surgeries and things like this.
You know you should have fruit and veg every day and bread and cereals every day, meat and fish, fats and sugars, milk and dairy. But what these segments are representing are the approximate amounts of each food group you should have. But we're interested in carbs, fats and proteins. What should you eat every day in terms of carbs, fats and proteins? Well, that's what it should look like.
This is generally for a normal person, normal in inverted commas. But 55% of what you eat every day should be carbohydrates. OK, 15% should be protein and 30% should be fats.
Now, you know, we always go on about fat, don't we, as our fat's the enemy and things like that. And, you know, the emphasis is now on sugar. Fat is very, very important for reasons that we're about to look at.
But for a normal, normal and inverted commas, I keep saying that for a normal person, that is what your diet should be made up with every day. For example, if you look here, your breads, your cereals, your potatoes, and your fruit and veg, they're typically your carbohydrate. You know, that's where you get a lot of your carbs from. So that's why just over half of what you eat every day should be from that food group. Protein, which is your meat and small amounts of dairy, you know, that's where that's why that's only 15%.
You might be looking, hang on, fat 30, that's only a very small segment. You get a lot of fat in dairy products as well. You get a lot of fat in meat and fish as well as just in pure fatty foods. So that's why we've got to have variety in there. You can't just do the same thing, three meals a day, every day of the week because you're not getting the variety.
But that's what I'm. balanced diet consists of. So then each of these food groups and a few more, let's have a look at them. Carbohydrates.
As you can see, they're all the foods that are typically high in carbohydrates. You've got your pastas, your rice, your potatoes, your bread, et cetera, et cetera. So carbohydrates, what is their primary function?
Carbs is the number one energy source. Okay. I'm just looking at the tab a bit, so I'm sorry if my voice changes.
It's the number one energy source. You might have heard it as the primary energy source, and it is. Don't get confused. A primary doesn't mean we use it first, as you might expect, and then we use our secondary energy source.
Primary means we pretty much use it all the time, i.e. I will break carbohydrates down when I'm working aerobically, walking, jogging, sitting still. But I will also burn carbohydrates when I'm working anaerobically, sprinting, lifting heavy weights, plyometrics training, anything that is at maximal intensity. As a result, it should make up about 75% of my total energy production. So, you know, the bulk of energy I'm getting is from carbohydrates every single day, hence why it's the thing I should eat the most of.
I can split carbs into two categories, though. Starches and sugars. Starches are what's known as glycogen, right? Now, glycogen is not slow-release carbs, but you store glycogen in your muscles and your liver. Hence why, ultimately, you've got a source that you can break down to last you a long period of time.
So if I was doing a marathon or if I was playing a game of football, I would make sure I ate a lot of glycogen-based carbohydrates, a lot of starchy carbohydrates in the build-up to that event so I could break it down over long periods of time. Your pastas, your breads, your rice, they are all typical examples of starchy carbohydrates. When my blood sugars, which is glucose, starts to run low, glycogen will be broken down into glucose. to top it back up.
So it's like having a reserve fuel tank in your body. When your blood glucose is running low, you go to your glycogen and that will top up your blood glucose. Your blood glucose is also known as sugars.
That's what it's more commonly is known as. So we can eat food that is high in sugar as well. Anything that's high in sugar is stored immediately in the bloodstream as glucose.
And that is your immediate quick energy release. What we'll sometimes talk about is if you are doing a big event, have a starchy meal. two hours before the event, so you get all the glycogen in, then half an hour before your event, have something sugary. You've topped up your glycogen and now you've also topped up your glucose as well.
That's all ready to go. Something that's very big in the country, in the world at this moment in time is the use of sugars. Only 10% of your carbs every day should be sugars. The reason being is glycogen, if you eat a lot of starch, it stores glycogen.
Glycogen stores your muscles and liver as a long-term energy source. Any excess glucose that you consume is turned into fat. And that's why people who consume a lot of sugars are getting obese.
Because they're not burning off those sugars, and so the body's turning those sugars, that glucose, into fat. So that's something to be aware of. So fats then, public enemy number one, but not the case anymore. Fats are very, very important.
Fats are our secondary energy source. I like to say with carbs. Carbs is primary, but it doesn't mean we use them first.
Then when we've run out of carbs, we then use our fat. carbs is primary because we use it aerobically and anaerobically so all the time fats is our secondary energy source because we can only use it when we are working aerobically so you're burning fat now if you're sat listening to this you're burning fat you're working aerobically you're sat breathing in lots of oxygen if you jog you're working aerobically long distance cycling swimming you're working aerobically but you don't burn fat so when you're working anaerobically so when you're sprinting or lifting heavy weights you don't burn fats and that's something that not enough people know about They think if they go to the gym and lift heavy weights, I'm going to burn this body fat. There's an old adage, I'm going to turn the fat into muscle.
Or, you know, you don't want to build up too much muscle mass because it'll turn into fat when you get older. Load of rubbish. Muscle doesn't turn into fat. Fat doesn't turn into muscle.
Fat is simply an energy source. If you do lots of aerobic activity, you will burn fat. If you eat a lot of fat and don't do any aerobic activity, you will put weight on.
You will put fat mass on. However, fat is very very important we insulate and protect our organs with it so yes it's an energy source we need it for energy we need to insulate and protect organs uh so it acts as a little barrier a little cushion around key nerves and key organs and we also store essential vitamins in fat we're going to look at those in a couple of minutes however there are two types of fat and i was putting it as good fats and there are bad fats the good fats are my unsaturated the bad fats are my saturated so let's deal with the saturated first They're the fats that are high in processed meats, in your butters, in your basic cheap oils, things like that. They carry high risk of coronary heart disease because they're the type of fats that will lie in the walls of your blood vessels.
They will cause blockages, increased blood pressure, things like that. Your unsaturated fats and things like avocados and your omega-3 fatty acids, your extra virgin olive oils and things like that, even nuts. They... are very, very good because not only do they provide energy, not only do they protect organs, not only do they store vitamins in them, but you're also seeing improved recovery rates with those types of fats.
You'll see reduced inflammation and joint stiffness, hence why people take cod liver oil capsules when they've got arthritis in the joints and things like that. So fat is very, very important. We've got to make sure we eat the right types and the right amount. So proteins then, as you can see, common in these types of foods, you're fish, your meat products, red and white meats, eggs, lentils and pulses, nuts, kidney beans are very high in protein. So we find proteins in a lot of different food groups.
You probably all know this, you've probably all done this at school. Proteins, muscle growth and repair. Hence why people are trying to bodybuild, pick up, increase muscle mass, consume more protein than a normal person does.
But something else that protein does is it makes enzymes. enzymes are the things that speed up reactions in your body so when you want to produce energy quicker an enzyme will do that so the enzymes are actually made of protein themselves as well as collagen now you find collagen in hair in your nails in your i think it's in front of your teeth but for a sports point of view it's found in cartilage and so for people who've got like cartilage damage increase your protein intake it'll strengthen the collagen that you've got will strengthen the cartilage and we also use protein to make antibodies. So as I'm doing this video, it's quite a cool time of the year, you know, increased risk of picking up illnesses and things like that. So the antibodies that fight infection are also made of proteins. We can also use protein as an aerobic energy source.
So I can break protein down aerobically as energy when I am running low on carbohydrates and fat. Hopefully it shouldn't come to that. Because don't forget, look what protein is making in your body. If I'm breaking down protein as an energy source, I'm essentially breaking down very important parts of my body. Fuel.
other parts of my body. So I don't want to be breaking down muscle tissue or enzymes or cartilage or antibodies into the protein, into the amino acids, so I can produce energy. I need to get my energy from carbs and fats.
I can do that, but hopefully I don't find myself in that situation because I eat a balanced diet. So minerals then. Minerals, you know, the thing is about minerals, each individual mineral does a different job.
So there's no way we can say like all minerals do this or all minerals do that. Like we can carbohydrates, all carbs provide us with energy. It's not the same with minerals. We're going to look at two in particular.
We're going to look at calcium and iron. And we'll quickly mention phosphorus as well. So I'm not just putting a random picture of fruit and veg atop. That's typically where we get a lot of our minerals from, hence why we need to eat five portions of fruit and veg every single day. But the three that I'm going to concentrate on, as I said, two in particular, calcium and iron, but we'll also mention phosphorus.
Calcium, as you know. your bones and your teeth are made of calcium but you know you've got your teeth now you've got your bones now why do i need to continue eating calcium every single day calcium is also essential for muscular contractions you actually pump calcium in and out of the muscle every time you want to contract a muscle so it's essential that we've got calcium in our body every single day it also helps blood clotting so if you get i know i know a lot of people think platelets that's essential for blood clotting absolutely they are but calcium also helps the formation of scabs and clots so you don't bleed to death and calcium is also involved in nerve transmission so when your brain is sending impulses to the muscles to get them to contract in the first place calcium is needed to help that nerve transmission so calcium is very very important iron and as i'm sure you all are well aware makes red blood cells it makes your hemoglobin and it's your red blood cells and hemoglobin that carries the oxygen in your blood so you might know someone who's got a condition called anemia where they're always tired um the reason is because they haven't got enough iron, so they don't produce enough haemoglobin, so they don't carry as much oxygen, therefore they're always quite fatigued because they're not going to function in the blood. But iron also helps support the immune system as well. And we've also got phosphorus, which again is involved in bone health, but also phosphorus is very important in energy production. So if you've got an athlete who obviously needs to get their energy from carbs and fats effectively, phosphorus is a very important supplement to take.
So what are vitamins then? And these are very similar to minerals in that each vitamin has its own individual role, just as each mineral had its own different role. And we only need vitamins in very small quantities, but they do perform essential physiological functions. Now this, I mentioned this earlier about storage of certain vitamins in fats.
This yellow bit here, this is fat. So as you can see, we store vitamins A, D, E and K in fat and we store vitamins B. B and C in water. So we've got fat soluble vitamins and water soluble vitamins.
It's important that you know that. It's important that you know what each one of these does. So we'll start with the fat soluble vitamins. And just to emphasize the fact that fat soluble means that these vitamins dissolve in fat. So what we're saying is, if you eat foods that are high in vitamins A, D, E, and K, and we get a lot more vitamins of those vitamins than we actually need at that moment in time, we will store those extra vitamins in.
fat. So if you have a day tomorrow where you don't eat as much of those vitamins, you've got some in reserve, you've got some stored, but you can only do that if you've got fat stores on your body. And that's where that came in there, what we said about fat being important, one of its key functions. So what we've got, as you can see, I'm only going to read them out to you, but you've got them there. Vitamin A is a very good antioxidant, good for eye health, cell, and that should say bone growth.
I think it's been also corrected, non-growth. Change that to bone growth. And vitamin D, bone health. and prevents cancer and heart disease.
I mean obviously it doesn't stop you from getting them but if you are having a high level of vitamin D every day then that is going to do you know a fair amount to prevent those diseases so it's very very important that we get a lot of vitamin D and equally that we have some fat stores so that we can store vitamin D. We also have vitamin E which is in eye health and it also strengthens the immune system and vitamin Q which is very important in blood clotting and bone health. So you can see there's a lot of them to do with bone health. all of them to do with setting air, support for certain structures in the body such as the eye and you know we mentioned that calcium helps with blood clotting, well so does vitamin K, we mentioned that iron was good for the immune system, so is vitamin K, so there is a fair amount of overlap but we do need to make sure we get a lot of these vitamins on board.
So onto the water soluble then and the key emphasis here is these vitamins B and C. dissolving water. Now the issue there is the water in our body we get rid of quite quickly. We sweat it out, water vapor in the breath, it goes into the blood, we excrete it out as well obviously. So vitamins B and C, yes they are stored in water but the reality is we really do need to consume these every single day because we replenish the water in our bodies pretty much every single day or we lose a lot of the water in our body every single day and as a consequence we lose the vitamins that are dissolved inside that water.
So it's important that we have vitamins B and C every day. These are the real important ones for athletes. Vitamins B breaks down food into energy. So if you notice on the back of any energy drinks that you drink, Red Bull, Emerge, Monster, Relentless, things like that, they put a lot of B vitamins into those drinks now.
They put the carbohydrates in there, so you've got the energy, and then they put the B vitamins in there so that you can break that carbohydrate down and get the energy from that food. so it's really really important for energy production and eye, skin and nervous system health is linked with high levels of vitamin B consumption and also vitamin C, skin, blood vessels, tendon, ligament and bone health again massively important if you're an athlete you need to look after your body, you need to look after your joints, your ligaments, your blood vessels, it's really really important you have a lot of vitamin C, you can see bone health feature heavily if in doubt in the exam. put bone health down if they give you a certain vitamin you're in with a shell there but you know try and revise these as much as you can so you know what each vitamin does. Water then I mean obviously people don't you know think that this is a nutrient of course it's a nutrient it's absolutely essential we will last longer without carbs fats and proteins than we ever will without water I think if you watch Bear Grylls you know these kind of survival programs they say things like you can survive three minutes without air three days without water and three weeks without food.
So, you know, water is absolutely essential in terms of a nutrient. So the functions of water in our system, it makes up to 90% of blood plasma. Now, I know this is maybe stating the obvious, right?
But your blood would be solid if it didn't have water in it. You might be going, well, that's obvious, but to some people it's not. Just think about that. The reason your blood is a liquid is because it has water in it. That water is technically called plasma.
That's the official term for it. And 90% of that plasma is just pure water. So without water, your blood would not be a liquid. You would not be able to pump it around the body.
So that's absolutely crucial. You wouldn't therefore be able to pump the red blood cells that carry the oxygen. So that, if anything, is the most vital role.
But also many substances dissolve in water. A prime example is carbon dioxide. Some carbon dioxide dissolves in water, but carbon dioxide is toxic. So by the fact that it dissolves in water, it means that you can then therefore carry it in the blood, because as we've said, 90% of the blood plasma is water, so it can transport that CO2 back to the lungs in liquid form and get rid of it and breathe it out.
Also, it allows us, probably the thing that we're most familiar with, is it allows us to regulate body temperature. So it allows us to sweat and lose heat through the process of evaporation. So the heat, the warm blood travels close to the skin surface. You know, we vasodilate, we open our blood vessels. The warm blood is close to the skin surface and there is the water, sweat on the skin, waiting for it to evaporate away and take the heat into the atmosphere.
That's why we need it. So the obvious problems are if we become dehydrated. So what is the issue with dehydration? Well, as we've said there, to keep going back to it, 90% of your blood plasma is water.
If I haven't got enough water through dehydration, my blood plasma is going to reduce. In other words, the blood is going to become thicker. Your blood, as we've said, is runny because it's a liquid. If I take liquid out of, if I take water out of the blood, sorry, it becomes thicker, it becomes more viscous. In essence, your blood becomes more of a treacle.
Therefore it's thicker so it's harder to pump round because it's harder to pump round your stroke volume the volume of blood pumps out the heart per beat Decreases as it's thicker is glupiates He's not gonna eject out of that left ventricle as effectively as it was when it was a nice runny liquid as a result Your heart rate has to increase if you're going to maintain your cardiac output So if you think back to where the videos on that you've looked those away you've done stroke volume stroke volume times heart rate equals cardiac output. If my stroke volume is decreased because my blood is thicker, my heart rate has to increase to maintain cardiac output, so my heart has to work harder just to work at the same workload. which isn't good.
We call that cardiovascular drift, just in case you're reading the textbook, that's it, it's 10. Your heart rate drifts upwards even though you are working at the same intensity and the reason that your heart rate has drifted upwards is because your throat volume has dipped downwards, the blood is thicker. Finally then, you've got an increase in body temperature because I haven't got the water anymore to sweat because I'm dehydrated. So that's why we've got to stay on top of that fluid balance, consume lots of water before, during. and after performance and finally then you'll be pleased to know on the shortest one left to last fiber fiber is a form of carbohydrate as you may have guessed by looking at this picture it's all the foods that you know is high in carbs your spaghettis you know your pastas your breads your cereals things like that but they're all you know darky brown color because that is i mean i know a lot of past any past is a brown color so i said like a dark brown color that's to represent the presence of wholemeal.
So it's like your wholemeal pastas and breads, they're the ones that are high in fibre. And even though it's a carbohydrate, it's not the type of carbohydrate that we use for energy production. It's mainly to help with the processing of food and in particular the large intestine. So it allows us to process food for waste, i.e. prevents constipation. Not a very appetising topic, but you know, it's absolutely essential.
And as a result, it reduces cholesterol because we can remove waste products from our body more effectively. And it'll also reduce the risk of diabetes and obesity and other diseases caused by being overweight. So they're the key nutrients. What can I tell you about them?
Well, you know, could you get a big answer question on it? Of course you could. You know, asking about a group of them. We could also get short answer questions just asking about the role of carbohydrates, the roles of vitamins.
What I would say to you in terms of the vitamins and minerals, make sure you can name three or four examples. of each uh you know so you can expand on them should you get a specific question about them and everything else just make sure you can say what they are and what they do hope you found this video useful folks