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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 24, 1987)
8 rt .fa 3-T3 rt -g ^ JJiis on-^T3 O S C"0 Srj’St! ^ D oii'S-S- 12 S W 5 -n 3 P e ca W -2 Srt 7^- ^~ SI _ [rf £ n 1 ' 1 « O.D £ >- _ m 2i i c u Su > k [O re03JS^' 1 3 'Zj tn £ V rt ■V S"2 ^ c 1 2 i J^Cj=l »S f=»S%C± is QC _ _ ■|||„ 1,1 „ - Well, I don't Rnow cit>oi_it college eind women, t>nt eis far as the red meat goes. Dr. Joanne R. Lupton, Texas A&M assistant professor of scientific nutrition, says the “red meat scare” was blown a little out of proportion. “The red part of the meat is the best part for you — it’s the iron-rich hemoglobin,” she says. “Red meat is our best source of iron because it’s so bioavailable — that is, available to the body. The bad part is the fat, and you can trim that or buy leaner meat.” Lupton adds that three or four ounces of red meat a day, whether you get it at your local Wendy’s or at the grocery store, is much better for you than eating chicken nuggets or the “seafood platter,” with that extra side of grease, to go. “If people think this is going to remedy their cholesterol problem, they are just fooling themselves,” she says. Acc xording to Lupton, quite a few myths fool the nutrition-conscious public today. OK, Roc, what do you do when you’re trying to counteract that bottle of No-Doz and slip into sleep with Wynken, Blynken and Nod? Be civil. • How ’bout that glass of soothing warm milk? According to findings by Dr. Judith Wurtman, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the nation’s leading investigators of mind nutrients — “brain food, ” if you will — milk, if anything, wakes you up. The protein in the milk provides you with energy. The Dallas Morning News reports that “in one experiment, for example, students were fitted with ear-phones and instructed to keep their fingers pressed on buttons unless they heard a tone, in which case they were to lift their fingers as fast as they could. Protein-eating volunteers reacted more quickly and accurately than their carbohydrate-eating counterparts, who made considerably more mistakes. ” That’s right, Aggies. And you always thought those carbohydrates were the energizers in your diet. Hang with me, now. According to research undertaken at MIT, Harvard and other universities of the sort, carbohydrates will relax you because they increase the level of serotonin, a neurotransmitter in the brain. Your brain produces the serotonin from tryptophan, an amino acid found in protein. I know, I know... I just said protein enlivens you. Keep reading. Consumption of carbohydrates frees this tryptophan for use by the brain. Health magazine explains tryptophan in an analogy. “Among amino acids, tryptophan is the runt of the litter, too weak to battle its way to the brain when bigger, stronger amino acids are all around, competing for the same goal. So, when you eat a lot of protein, the tryptophan you take in doesn’t have much effect on you. “In contrast, when you eat carbohydrates — whether complex or simple — they stimulate the production of the hormone insulin, and one of insulin’s jobs is to hustle amino acids out of the bloodstream and into muscle cells. But insulin ignores tryptophan, so although the amount of tryptophan in the bloodstream doesn’t change, the ratio of tryptophan to the other amino acids goes way up. “Freed from competition, the tryptophan rushes right to your brain the way the runt heads right for the food dish when the other puppies go out to play. The result is that the brain gets the tryptophan, manufactures the serotonin, and you start to feel cozy, warm, lethargic or sleepy. All this takes place in only a couple of hours. ” So that’s why the bag monster gets you during those post lunch classes. Now you’re catching on. Lupton says the best thing to do when you start to feel a hunger pang, is to eat something containing not just th< wmm by Lauren Naylor I carbohydrates, but something with protein and fat in it too, like bread with peanut butter on it. OK, so now you’re thinking that the next time that guy comes around to your door selling protein, you’ll just stock up and pop some before your next test. Lupton says this is the expensive way to handle it. “There are a couple of guys in my class who were taking protein supplements with their diet,” she explains. “The product