Your questions about food

Hi. I have to research up on food additives and e numbers etc. (all bad stuff in food)i typed in some stuff on google search and it came up with your website. i would like to congratulate you for making such an excelent page. it really helped me to understand why my parents keep saying to me ‘dont eat too much of this! its unhealthy!’ but i was wondering if you could give me any info on food additives and e numbers. eg. what they are… why they are so bad… Thank you for your time. Miss Stevenson

Additives are put into food for various reasons. Some are quite innocent (like vitamin C) and others are not. Many are put in to make food look good or taste so good that you want to eat more than you should. E numbers for additives are intended to make it simple to find out what a particular additive is and what it does. Just because a food has E numbered additives in it doesn’t necessarily make it bad… though it could be. On the whole, the more additives there are, the more processed the food is and, in general, processed food is not particularly wholesome; not ‘good for you’. The best food is organic and fresh. [more on food additives]

Dear Tiki, I’m Katie and I’m in third grade. I think it’s a bit silly to ask this question but……….. Is there such thing as eating too much veggies or fruit? From Katie

Dear Katie: It’s a perfectly sensible question! Some types of food you shouldn’t eat too much of but I don’t think you can eat too much veggies and fruit. In fact, most people eat far too few of these healthy foods. The only thing I’d suggest is that you don’t ‘pig out’ on any one veg or fruit (like eating carrots and nothing else!) but eat lots of different types and colours.

How does food get to our plate?

Here’s a very simple example of how food gets to your plate. Imagine you have a garden. You grow some vegetables and keep some chickens (farming). You want to eat a meal so you dig up or cut some of your vegetables and collect some eggs (harvest), you put your harvest in a basket and carry it into your kitchen (transport), you take the stuff out and wash it and cut it up (process it) and then cook it. Then you serve it out and eat it.
These days, most food is harvested by machines and is often processed in factories. It’s transported by road (trucks), sea (ships) and air (aircraft) to shops like supermarkets where most people buy their food. Often, it’s already processed and cooked so all you have to do is put it on a plate and eat it.
Have you looked at my Food Guide, by the way?

Tiki, We just read your website in our 3rd grade Social Studies lesson. We are learning about Pollution. We are wondering what we can do to get public schools like ours to serve only organic food to kids. Mrs. Nestel’s 3rd grade class.

That’s an interesting question and I don’t know the answer. But school food comes from somewhere so what you have to do is find out where that is and who pays for it. If you pay for it yourselves, you should have a right to choose what you want to eat. Does your school have a board of governors? Could you collect a petition in your class asking them to ensure you have an organic option? I’m sure your teacher will be able to help with these and other ideas. I wish you luck!

Could you please tell me… how much sugars an average person should eat a day? and how much sugars an average person should have in their body i have looked on the internet but i cant seem to find the answer anywere. many thanks

This is not easy. Nobody needs to eat sugar at all but most people like to because sugary things taste good. Your body needs sugars for energy and it makes all it needs from foods called carbohydrates (like bread, potatoes and rice). How it does this is quite complicated and involves a special substance called insulin which regulates the amount in your bloodstream all the time. Your needs for blood sugar (= energy supplies to your muscles and brain) depend upon how active you are. If you’re lying in bed watching TV, your needs are low. If you’re climbing a mountain, they are high. So it’s not really possible to answer your second question. .

can u help me find some thing about junk food?

Try this Wikipedia link. Ask the Dietitian is also good

Dear tiki: if landfill sites that have waste food in them – like potato peelings – make methane, don’t compost heaps do the same thing? puzzled, tara

Dear Tara: It’s all to do with the bacteria. Bacteria in compost heaps are aerobic – which means they thrive in airy conditions when there’s plenty of oxygen. The aerobic microbes break down the waste food and make useful compost which gardeners and farmers use to improve their soils. Sometimes very large compost heaps are made by companies who deal with garden ‘waste’ by the truckload. But although these are large, the bacteria still get plenty of air because machines regularly turn them over.
In landfills, organic waste (like food, babies’ diapers, paper and so on) just gets compacted together with everything else, rammed down by big machines. This means that any air left in the stuff quickly gets used up by the aerobic bacteria which then die. The waste then becomes anaerobic, which means there’s no oxygen. Some bacteria – anaerobic bacteria – can live in these conditions because they don’t need oxygen. The decay process is slow and smelly and one of their waste products is methane gas. In well managed landfills, this gas is collected and burned to make heat and electricity (on a small scale). If it isn’t burned, the methane escapes into the atmosphere where it becomes a powerful greenhouse gas.
So all in all, it’s better to make compost out of waste food.