This question on which food is best for students should be asked by every student, every parent and every teacher. But seldom we find such questions from any sphere. All are eager, worried and anxious about the output or the performance of the student. But seldom one is worried or eager about the input, especially when it comes to input of food. It is almost taken granted that whatever a student eats, that is good and enough for the student to give out his best performance. Nothing could be more ridiculous than this.
Food is an essential requirement of every human being. But certain categories of people need more care on nutritious foods than many others. Like the sportsmen need to meticulously plan their food chart otherwise there is hardly much chance of highly competitive performances which will lead them to success at national and international levels. The hard work, stress and strains of a sportsman or an army personnel etc. are very evidently visible and hence conceivable.
But in the case of a student, the requirement of high nutrition does not appear so imminent. Usually it is thought that any average food habit will generate good performances. But we need to realise that average input usually can be expected to generate average output only, let it be in sports or let it be in studies.
In real life we do see some cases where students with quite poor food input also sometimes perform quite well. That poor food habit may be due to two possibilities – either due to poverty or due to bad food choices or eating on just a taste factor.
But it is wrong to expect that such good performances are our reference index to follow. Actually most of such cases have got some genetic build to perform at low input of food usually for a certain period of time. But such performances seldom continue throughout the whole of professional life. In most of such cases they spend their vital life energy in the very early phase of life and that turns into a cumulative deficiency. As a result the probability of an unhappy professional and most importantly of unhappy personal life gets too high.
People have a general misconception that it is only the professional life that is performance intensive. Nothing is as a misconception than this. We should never forget that it is the personal life first that determines the quality of the student life as well as the quality of professional life. And I have seen plenty of people doing good in professional life still performing worse in personal life. But one who can perform good in his personal life can easily perform good in his professional life.
Just one small example. The question of meditation obviously falls in the domain of personal life. It is a part of personal lifestyle and culture. Now if someone is capable of performing 1 hour meditation at a stretch, if one have got that much mental and physical power then there will be nothing to worry, he will perform good as a student as well as a professional. But the reverse is essentially not the fact. There are plenty of topper students and high earning professionals who would keep struggling hard for even a few minutes of meditation (Just sitting or lying down with closed eyes is not called meditation, rather you can call it relaxation).
So it can be proved that students need very good quality and highly nutritious food. When talking about nutrition the first thing that comes to discuss is the food category of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the most important category that can be said as the vital source of energy.
Have you ever seen that a severe patient who is hospitalized at the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) is given “saline drip” as the only “food” and nothing else as food? Well such is the importance of carbohydrates. Saline drip is made up of some salts and glucose solution. This glucose is the carbohydrate category food. It is the simplest carbohydrate a human body needs. All other carbohydrate food is digested and converted to glucose inside our body as all the biological processes inside the body as well as the working and the maintaining of all the organs are totally dependent on the supply of glucose through blood.
Such is the importance of glucose and carbohydrates in your body. Carbohydrate intake is therefore the first thing that I will discuss.
The other two major nutrition or macro-nutrients are protein and fat respectively. They have got their purposes in our body. Other than those purposes, they can also be converted into glucose for supply to different organs through blood when required energy. But it is not advisable to intake and break too much protein for energy production. The same goes for fat nutrients.
You cannot take too much of fat everyday for supply of energy besides its own prescribed functionalities. Fats and oils have their own specialized functions ranging from immune system to bone joints, temperature balance to brain functions. If you use too much fat for conversion into glucose for energy generation, then probably these essential functions will suffer from deprivation.
Similarly protein also has its own very vital functions. It is the main structural building block of your body and brain. Everyday, the whole system gets more than enough wear and tear due to daily work and related stress and strains. Those micro-damages are needed to get repaired on a daily basis otherwise it can become cumulative which can turn very dangerous and harmful with passing time. Moreover there are normal regular cell regeneration processes in almost every organ of the body. This regeneration is the basic regular maintenance of the body. Protein takes a very vital role in all these repair and maintenance functions of the body.
So naturally it is not expected or wanted that you will use up your valuable protein intake for breaking it up into glucose and consume that for energy supply to cells and organs. And usually as a food, protein nutrition is more costly than carbohydrates and fat nutrition.
Also protein digestion is most complex and taxing for your body than the carbohydrates or fat counterparts. Even if you have enough economics to intake way too much protein everyday, but that does not anyhow ensure that your digestive system will be able to digest and take that protein up from the food. You need a range of enzymatic and hormonal support for proper extraction and utilization of protein in your body. If you fail to use up the excess protein you intake daily then there are high possibilities that it will act against your health to generate various disease conditions.
So conserving protein for its own specialized essential functions will be a more intelligent choice. And using carbohydrates as major energy production nutrition is a good choice because on one hand they are usually cheapest of nutrition among protein and fat. And on the other hand they are the easiest nutrition to be digested and absorbed by your body.
Actually carbohydrate digestion and absorption starts right from your mouth as you are chewing the food and mixing it with saliva which have got the necessary enzymes to the carbohydrates of the food to glucose, which is then absorbed right there within your mouth. So now you can understand the engineering of your natural body a bit and why carbohydrates are the best choice of energy production for that system of your body.
The actual energy producing nutrient is the carbohydrate, which can easily provide the huge amount of energy that our body and brain (mostly in cases of good and studious students) require. And here the main focus is on studies and students. The brain is a huge energy demanding organ which alone can demand more than 20% of your body’s total energy requirement in just normal situations. The requirements shoot much higher when you are using your brain to learn something complex or solve some complex problems, etc.
So now let me discuss some foods which are good sources of the carbohydrates.
(To be continued….)