Traditional Uses Of Contents: Citrimax™ has been shown to reduce appetite and inhibit fat production. Chitosan has been used to reduce the absorption of fats by the body. Ginseng has been used as a stimulant to help the body’s metabolism.

Our foods contain the following basic nutrients: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and water.

Carbohydrates, our body's most efficient source of energy and an essential component in the production of many structural and functional materials, are produced by plants in the process of photosynthesis. They are made of compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen called sugars. Molecules of these simple sugars attach together to make long chains that are called complex carbohydrates. The large carbohydrate molecules are referred to as starch.

Once you eat them, digestion by intestinal enzymes disassembles these chains back into simple sugars. Metabolic processes change these simple sugars into energy, which provides fuel for the body's activity.

Dietary fibers are even longer chains of complex carbohydrates. Unlike starch molecules, these fibers resist digestion. Therefore, most fibers eventually end up in the colon and form the bulk of your stool. Dietary fibers are present in all plant tissues. For example, after a potato is peeled, the white matter we eat has plenty of relatively indigestible fibers in it.

Fats too are complex molecules made up of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Although they are not as easily digested as sugars are, fats are sources of energy and they provide important structural materials for building different components of the human body. Fats are divided into two categories: saturated fats (solid at room temperature), found mostly in animal tissues, and unsaturated fats (liquid), found mostly in plant tissues. Most fats can be synthesized by our own bodies from carbohydrates as they are needed. The fats that we can synthesize are said to be nonessential because they are not necessary ingredients in our diet. The only fats we cannot synthesize for ourselves are a few unsaturated fats from plant tissue. They must be provided to us, ready-made, in our foods and are called essential fats.

Proteins provide the raw materials for a large part of the functional and structural components of our bodies. Only as a last resort are they used as a source of energy. The building blocks of proteins are called amino acids. Various combinations of the same twenty two- amino acids, put together as are the letters of the alphabet that can form a whole dictionary of words with different meanings, make all of the proteins in nature. Proteins are found in all foods derived from animals and plants, unless they have been removed or altered by refining processes. Only eight of the twenty-two amino acids are essential to us, because they cannot be made in human metabolism.

Water makes up a large part of our foods. Although it yields no energy, for many reasons water is an essential element for life. It is not just a passive solvent in which salts, compounds and gasses interact; water participates actively in forming building blocks of cells and is the environment in which cells live. Approximately 60 percent of body weight is water

Taken from Nutritional Foundations A Basic Lesson by Dr. John MacDougall

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Last modified: June 04, 2004