Good Fat for your Eyes

Today I read an article on how omega-3 fatty acids may help reduce the risk of AMD (age-related macular degeneration) which is the top cause of blindness in people 65 and older.

Club Officers for 2009-2010

From Soraida:

Hi NutClubbers,

Thanks to all who attended the End of the Year Party! It was a blast! Thanks to Dr. Sparks for all your hard work and delicious food!

The 2009-2010 NutClub Officers are:

President: Davie Linker
Vice President: Carrie Strong
Treasurer: Michelle Schaffer
Secretary: Allison Arterbury
Philanthropist: Chad Escallier
Fundraising Chair: Steven Kwan
PR/Speaker Coordinator: TBD

$200 scholarship recipients: Julie Lylyk & Steven Kwan

Congratulations, everyone! Thank you all for a fabulous year. I wish all the officers the best in the upcoming year. Kick butt!

Got Experience?

By Kelly Jackson, MS, RD

Keep it simple folks.  Finding volunteer or work experience does not have to be a chore.  There are far more opportunities available to you than you might expect.  Often students think they have to find something in the hospital setting, but this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding the perfect volunteer or work experience.  All experience, nutrition-related or not, can add substantially to a dietetic internship or graduate school application.  The best advice is to find a cause, association or health-related area that you are passionate about and see if any opportunities exist locally in which you could get involved.

There are some exciting areas to look into such as food/diet research, food sustainability, health/fitness promotion, and eating disorders.  Feel free to be creative and tailor your experience to your own interests.  For example, you may have an interest in sports nutrition, which could be put to use by giving a local high school sports team a presentation on healthy eating.  Also, the Community Food Bank is doing some great work with locally grown fruits and vegetables at their Marana Farm, and they always need volunteers to tend to the fields and help maintain crops.  What a great way to learn about farm-to-plate issues!  Of course, the Nut Club is always an option for those wanting exposure to a wide array of opportunities, with the added bonus networking and team-building.

Here a few more tips as you begin to gain volunteer or work experience:
•    Start building a resume by recording all the extracurricular activities in which you participate.  Career Services has excellent resources on resumes and cover letters and provides basic templates.
•    Record any significant experience along with specific details such as start and end dates, hours per week (or total hours), and key responsibilities.
•    For some experiences you may be able to earn independent study credit, especially if they are related to work being done by NSC faculty.  If you would like more information on setting up an independent study, contact Kelly Jackson (kjackson@email.arizona.edu)
•    Getting a paid position is always nice, but volunteering tends to be more flexible in terms of time and offers a wider range of opportunities.  Generally gaining volunteer experience first will set the stage for paid positions down the road.

For more ideas about where to volunteer or find work opportunities, see the list of possible organizations, health services and hospitals.

Wakame

I have searched for the name of the particular seaweed that swims gracefully in my bowl of miso soup. Its texture is delicate, with a rubbery body that gives ever so slight a crunch between my teeth. I have found it to be wakame.

Any sea vegetable has a relatively good nutrient profile, high in iodine, vitamin K, folate, magnesium, calcium, iron, tryptophan, and — obviously — a high sodium content, for not too many calories.

Nori seaweed is famous for its use in sushi while spirulina is probably the most famous sea vegetable (followed closely by chlorella), because it has an amazing nutrient profile that includes potassium, protein, vitamin A, and beta carotene, with lower sodium content.

Pretty impressive for an algae.

I have to say, I haven’t met an edible algae that didn’t taste good.
On days when I just don’t feel like eating cyanobacteria, or can’t afford it, I just head for the spinach, which has pretty much everything (including oxalic acid ☹) anybody could want from a vegetable. Quick boiling reduces the amount of oxalic acid, reducing the chances for gout and improving nutrient absorption.

The World’s Healthiest Foods website can tell you more about spinach, along with a plethora of other great foods. They have a food advisor into which you put your eating habits, and it tells you which Healthiest Foods you should probably eat more of. This site has a lot of great random facts about foods for wowing your friends with interesting trivia at the dinner table.

YMCA Bash! (September 20, 2008)

For many, Saturday + 8 am volunteering = hmm… I’d rather sleep in! For the NutClub, this = sleeping is for later!

Ten of our bravest little NutClubbers showed up at the YMCA for another nutrition education for the community.

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

We had our food guide pyramid poster, our bilingual brochure, and 2 cool games with prizes! (Thanks to our awesome education material/prizes gurus: Nancy-Jennifer and Heather-Vanessa! ) From Frisbees, squishy soccer balls, mini radios, physical activities magnets, and yo-yos – the kids enjoyed them all after they answered fruit and veggie trivia! Who said learning had to be boring!

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

There were so many activities for the kids to do, that even some of us joined in the fun. Andrew, Molly, and I buckled up for some good o’ fashioned rock climbing (the first one of my life, by the way!). It was a total thrill!

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

From YMCA Health Fair Sept. 20, 2008

Then, 6 of us girls got a little competitive on a relay game that involved us running to a wall and turning off one of 3 lights on it, running back, and passing a squishy baton to our next teammate in line. After like 3 minutes of total sprinting, my heart was going like a million miles an hour. But, of course, my team won! Hurray! Great work to the other team, though. It was a good race! With all that running, we didn’t even had to be part of the 2 mile walk!

Next, we got to mingle around other booths, and learn even more about nutrition, dental care, fire safety, etc. There were even massages being given, but none of us got to enjoy that relaxing activity because they decided to end the sessions right when we stepped up to get ours. Shame on them!

Then, we enjoyed a performance by YMCA girls who put on a mean hip-hop routine. They definitely left my dance skills on the floor! But, it was great to see kids enjoying what they loved, while at the same time, getting their physical activity in their day. Burn calories, burn!

At the end of it all, it was a great bonding experience for us all. We all got to know each other a little better, had tons of fun, and even got to network a little. Hurray for that! Davie, Irene, and Bianca definitely left there with some awesome pictures of it all. Enjoy them!

Go Organic! – The Dirty Dozen

I buy organic food indiscriminately. I will pick up anything on my shopping list that is organic, even if it’s more expensive than it’s non-organic counterpart, such as peanut butter, as long as it’s organic.

The thing is, before starting this column I knew very little about the mechanics of organic food. Okay, so it’s grown “better” but I had no idea what that really meant. After my grocery store trips, when I looked at my receipt, I realized that I may be spending too much money on a kind of food I don’t know much about.

Organic food is, at its most basic, clean, minimally processed food that doesn’t contain anything but the food itself. Specifically, organic foods cannot have been treated with synthetic chemicals (often used as pesticides), grown in synthetic fertilizer, irradiated or genetically modified in any way. Organic animal products must come from animals who have outdoor access, have been fed organic feed (not containing animal byproducts) for at least a year, and have not been treated with growth hormones or antibiotics. Organic farms foster natural growth, so an insect infestation, for example, that would normally be treated with pesticides, might be treated with a natural predator instead, such as a bird or rodent.

Fun at Elvira Elementary! (August 29, 2008)

So how does the NutClub kick off the 2008-2009 year? With some kid fun at Elvira Elementary, of course! Strapped with a fun poster, a blow-up food pyramid—which we got a total workout blowing up, by the way!—and a food jeopardy wheel, 10 of us headed off to Elvira to provide some nutrition education to students and their families.

I know I don’t speak only for myself when I say that we had a total blast! The kids were answering the nutrition questions like no other:

From Elvira Elementary – Family Fitness Night

Hot, sweaty, hungry, and thinking

My legs burn.
I’m hot.
I can’t believe how long it is.
I am a new bicycle commuter to school (and back home) everyday.
8 miles, round trip. Maybe not Olympiad level, but it seems like a workout at this point.

And now I am hungry.

There are all sorts of theories about what is the best food/pseudo food to follow up a workout with, and even more products that will tell you they have the optimum balance of carbohydrates, amino acids, vitamins, minerals/electrolytes, herbal extracts, etc., that will make your body into a smooth-running machine. You know, I could probably get up Mt. Lemmon on my bike after they got through with me…

Things to Think About When You are Hot, Sweaty, and Hungry

NSC Journal Club: Seminar

Inhibition of Novel Molecular Targets of Prostaglandin Formation for Anti-Tumor Activity

By

Emmanuelle J. Meuillet, PhD

Assistant Professor

University of Arizona

Nutritional Sciences Department

Molecular and Cellular Biology Department

BIO5- AZCC

Go Organic!

Organic food is everywhere.  You can buy it at any local grocery store, Target, gas stations, and pretty much anywhere else food is sold.

But what is organic food? Is eating it healthier? Is it worth the extra cost?

I’ll discover the answers to these and many other questions in my column, Go Organic! And if you can think of a more creative title, just leave your suggestions in the comments, I know this one isn’t that great. So if you have any burning questions about organic food, or just want to know more about a certain aspect relating to organics, leave a comment or send me a message, and I’ll try to answer it in an upcoming column.

So look for a new and complete column sometime next week about organic food! I’ll also be including recipes using (mostly) organic ingredients, so if you have ideas or want to see something in particular, just let me know!

Katie Casanova, the Go Organic! columnist