What Discretionary Calories Allowance Actually Is?

If you consistently build your diet by choosing mostly nutrient-dense foods that are low in solid fat and added sugars, you may be able to meet your nutrient needs without using your full calorie allowance. If so, you may have what is called a discretionary calories allowance for use in meeting the rest of your calorie needs.

Most discretionary calories allowances are very small, between 100 and 300 calories, especially for those who are not physically active. How do we track these extra calories?
One example is a regular 12-ounce soda that contains 155 calories but all 155 of these calories are from added sugars and, thus, are considered “discretionary” calories. Keep in mind that, for many people, the discretionary calories allowance is totally used up in the foods they choose in each food group, such as higher-fat meats, higher-fat cheeses, whole milk, and sweetened bakery products.

Your discretionary calories can be used to:

Eat additional nutrient-dense foods from each of the food groups, such as an extra container of low-fat yogurt or an extra piece of fruit.

Select limited amounts of foods that are not in their most nutrient-dense form and/ or contain solid fats or added sugars, such as whole milk, full-fat cheese, sausage, biscuits, sweetened cereal, and sweetened yogurt.

Add fats or sweeteners to foods, such as sauces, gravies, sugar, syrup, butter, and jelly.

Eat or drink items that contain only fats, caloric sweeteners, and/or alcohol, such as candy, soda, wine, and beer.

Added fats and sugars are always counted as discretionary calories, as in the following examples:

The fat in reduced-fat or whole milk or milk products and the sugar and fat in chocolate milk, ice cream, and pudding.

The fat in higher-fat meats (e.g., poultry with skin, higher-fat luncheon meats, sausages).

The sugars added to fruits, fruit juices, and fruits canned in syrup.

The fat in vegetables prepared with added fat.

The added fats and/or sugars in grain products such as sweetened cereals, higher-fat crackers, pies, cakes, and cookies.

Vitamin A Benefits

Vitamin A is one of the most versatile vitamins, playing roles in several important body processes. The best known vitamin A benefits relates to vision. For a person to see, light reaching the eye must be transformed into nerve impulses that the brain interprets to produce visual images. The transformers are molecules of pigment in the cells of the retina, a paper-thin tissue lining the back of the eye. A portion of each pigment molecule is retinal, a compound the body can synthesize only if vitamin A is supplied by the diet in some form. Thus, when vitamin A is deficient, vision is impaired. Specifically, the eye has difficulty adapting to changing light levels. For a person deficient in vitamin A, a flash of bright light at night (after the eye has adapted to darkness) is followed by a prolonged spell of night blindness. Because night blindness is easy to diagnose, it aids in the diagnosis of vitamin A deficiency. (Night blindness is only a symptom, however, and it may indicate a condition other than vitamin A deficiency.)

One of the best vitamin A benefits are it helps to maintain healthy epithelial tissue: skin and the cells (called epithelial cells) lining such body cavities as the small intestine and lungs. Vitamin A is also involved in the production of sperm, the normal development of fetuses, the immune response, hearing, taste, and growth.

As much as a year’s supply of vitamin A can be stored in the body (90 percent of it in the liver). If you stop eating good food sources of vitamin A, deficiency symptoms will not begin to appear until your stores are depleted. Then, however, the consequences are profound, and include blindness and reduced resistance to infection. Although vitamin A deficiency is rarely seen in developed countries such as the United States and Canada, it is a serious public health problem in developing countries, where millions of children suffer from blindness, infections, and the other consequences of vitamin A deficiencies.

Vitamin A toxicity, in contrast, is not nearly as widespread as deficiency. Nevertheless, it can also lead to severe health consequences, including joint pain, dryness of skin, hair loss, irritability, fatigue, headaches, weakness, nausea, and liver damage. Thus, it’s especially important not to take mega doses of this nutrient even it has a good vitamin A benefits for the body.

Although toxicity poses a hazard to people who take supplements of preformed vitamin A, toxicity poses virtually no risk to people who obtain vitamin A from foods in the form of beta-carotene.

Sources of Vitamin A in Foods The major sources of vitamin A (in the form of beta-carotene) are almost all brightly colored, in hues of green, yellow, orange, and red which are the best vitamin A benefits for the body. Any plant food with significant vitamin A activity must have some color, because beta-carotene is a rich, deep-yellow, almost orange color. (Preformed vitamin A is pale yellow.) The dark-green leafy vegetables contain large amounts of the green pigment chlorophyll, which masks the carotene in them.

Benefits of Drinking Water

Most of you might know that the human body is about 60% water but what are the benefits of drinking water? Water is an important constituent of all body tissues and is essential for survival. You could survive for weeks without food, but only a few days without water. This is in part because of water’s role in allowing chemical reactions, including those that provide you with energy, to take place within your cells. A lack of water will cause health symptoms faster than a lack of any other nutrient. Even minor changes in the amount and distribution of body water can be life-threatening. For example, days, and even weeks, without taking in some vitamins and minerals will not cause deficiency symptoms, but an hour of exercise in hot, humid weather can lead to nausea, dizziness, weakness, and other symptoms that are due to lack of water. If the water that’s lost during exercise is not replaced, it can be a life-threatening situation.

Adequate water consumption each day is one of the benefits of drinking water that can help decrease risk of bladder, breast, and colon cancer as well as of kidney stone formation. People feel and perform better when they are adequately hydrated.

Water is also essential for maintaining the fluid balance inside your body. Think about it: Your body cells are plump with fluid, and they float in the fluid that surrounds them. As part of your body fluid, water is essential for maintaining fluid balance. Fluid balance refers to the equal distribution of fluid among several compartments in your body. Maintaining the equal distribution of all this body fluid is crucial to health and water and dissolved minerals play key roles.

Water is a wonderful solvent, a liquid in which substances dissolve. As a solvent, water is part of the medium in which molecules come in contact with each other. This contact between molecules allows chemical reactions to take place. For example, the combining of specific amino acids to synthesize a protein occurs in the watery medium inside your cells.

The water in blood and lymph helps transport substances throughout your body. Only about 45% of your blood is red blood cells and most of the rest is water. As part of blood, water helps transport oxygen, nutrients, and other important substances to your cells. It also helps transport waste products away from cells to be excreted in urine and stool. Like the fluid in blood, lymph fluid is almost entirely water. Lymph transports proteins back to the bloodstream, and it is important in the absorption of fats.

Other benefits of drinking water are water in blood helps maintain body temperature by increasing or decreasing the amount of heat lost at the body surface. When body temperature starts to rise, the blood vessels in the skin become wide, which increases blood flow to the skin and allows more heat to be released into the environment. This is why your skin turns red in hot weather or during strenuous activity. In a cold environment, the opposite occurs. The blood vessels in the skin constrict which restricts the flow of blood near the surface and conserves body heat.

Fat Soluble Vitamins

A vitamin is either fat soluble or water soluble, depending on how it is absorbed and handled in your body. Fat soluble vitamins need dietary fat to be properly absorbed, whereas water soluble vitamins are absorbed with water. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble; the B vitamins and vitamin C are water soluble.

The fat soluble vitamins are absorbed at the beginning of your small intestine. They are packaged with fatty acids and bile in micelles, small transport carriers that shuttle them close to the intestinal wall. Once there, the fat soluble vitamins travel through the cells in the intestinal wall and are packaged with fat and other lipids in chylomicrons. The vitamins then travel through your lymph system before they enter your bloodstream.

Fat soluble vitamins are stored in your body and used as needed when your dietary intake falls short. Your liver is the main storage depot for vitamin A and to a lesser extent vitamins K and E, whereas vitamin D is mainly stored in your fat and muscle tissues. Because they are stored in the body, large quantities of some of the fat soluble vitamins, particularly A and D, can build up to the point of toxicity, causing harmful symptoms and conditions.

Vitamin A
Major functions: Vision, cell differentiation, reproduction, bone health, immune function.
Food Sources: Beef liver, fortified dairy products.
Toxicity symptoms: Compromised bone health, birth defects during pregnancy.
Deficiency Symptoms: Night blindness, xerophthalmia, stunting of bones.

Vitamin D
Major functions: Calcium balance, bone health, cell differentiation, immune system.
Food Sources: Fatty fish (salmon, tuna, sardines), fortified foods (dairy products, orange juice, cereals).
Toxicity symptoms: Hypercalcemia.
Deficiency Symptoms: Rickets and osteomalacia.

Vitamin E
Major functions: Antioxidant, health of cell membranes, heart health.
Food Sources: Vegetable and seed oils, nuts, seeds, fortified cereals, green leafy vegetables.
Toxicity symptoms: Interference with blood clotting and increased risk of hemorrhage.
Deficiency Symptoms: Nerve problems, muscle weakness, and uncontrolled movement of body parts.

Vitamin K
Major functions: Blood clotting, bone health.
Food Sources: Green leafy vegetables, soybeans, canola and soybean oils, beef liver.
Toxicity symptoms: None known.
Deficiency Symptoms: Excessive bleeding