Many people do not realise that alcohol can be viewed as a nutrient, just like protein, carbs and fat. Would you ever have thought of it that way?. When consuming alcohol the following is to be remembered:

• Alcohol contains kilojoules and therefore adds extra kilojoules to your daily intake, which can jeopardise your weight management programme
• The human body prefers to use alcohol as an energy source rather than fat. Consuming too much alcohol will therefore diminish fat loss which is counter productive if your'e wanting to reduce weight
• It is better to have an alcoholic drink with a meal or a snack as alcohol is absorbed directly from the stomach and may cause hyperglycaemia if taken on an empty stomach
• Consuming too much alcohol late at night may lead to high blood glucose levels in the morning, especially if you have diabetes. Always take alcohol in moderation and with food.
• Give preference to the following drinks, as they are lower in kilojoules and/or alcohol:
  • Dry or "lite" white wine
  • Dry red wine
  • Wine "spritzer" - wine mixed with soda water
  • Dry sherry
  • "Lite" Beer
  • Spirits such as whisky, brandy, vodka (have asingle tota and top it up again and again with soda water)
• If you are trying to maintain weight, do not consume more than 1-2 units of alcohol for female and 2-3 units for males. This is also a good guide for general health as over consumption predisposes high blood pressure, high cholestrol levels, many types of cancer and osteoporosis amongst others.
• Remember that 1 unit of alcohol is equal to:
  • 125 ml wine or champagne
  • 60 ml sherry
  • 340 ml can or bottle "lite" beer
  • 170 ml regular beer
  • 25 ml of spirits
  • 250 ml "spritzer" at least half should be soda water or ice
  • 170 ml apple cider
  • 80 ml spirit coolers such as Smirnoff Ice

Although this section deals specifically with the healthy options to place in your child's lunch box, the same principles apply to adults preparing lunch for work. Healthy lunches and snacks are important and help with concentration and learning. Healthy eating changes are not always easy to make. Try to set a good example with your own lunches. Encourage children to be involved in their own lunch preparation, and their choices about foods to include. Praise your child when they choose healthy foods for the lunch box.

There are limited times for children to eat during the day, especially at school. Children may prefer to play with friends instead of eating. Encourage your child to sit and eat before heading out to play, or talk to your school about making sure all children get a chance to eat enough before play starts.

Six items to put in a lunch box

• Vegetables

• Fresh fruit

• Dairy food – cheese or yoghurt

• Protein food – slice of lean meat, hard-boiled egg or beans

• Starchy food – bread, roll, pita or flat bread, fruit bread or crackers

• Water.

Food suggestions

There are endless food choices available for lunch boxes. It can sometimes be difficult to decide which foods are healthy choices.

Vegetables
Best choices
Try vegetable sticks with dips, or a small container with mixed vegetables such as cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks, celery, corn, beetroot, sprouts, capsicum, snow peas or cucumbers.

Foods best left out
Crisps are best left for parties.

Fruit
Best choices
Fresh, or tinned fruit in natural juice, are everyday foods. Dried fruit is sticky and high in sugar, so eat occasionally or as part of a meal.

Foods best left out
Dried fruit bars and ‘straps’ are very high in sugar, low in fibre and stick to children’s teeth causing tooth decay.

Dairy food
Best choices

• Reduced fat cheese slices or cubes.

• Yoghurt – natural or fruit yoghurt. Try freezing a tub of yoghurt and putting it in your child’s lunch box. By lunchtime it will have partially thawed and be ready to eat.

Foods best left out
‘Dairy desserts’ and flavoured milks are high in sugar.

Sandwiches
Include a variety of bread and fillings, especially if children begin to lose interest in sandwiches.

Best choices
Choose one or more of the following:

• Salmon or tuna in springwater.Try mini cans of tuna with added flavours.

• Reduced fat cheese or cheese spread

• Egg

• Falafel or lentil patties

• Sliced lean cold meats such as ham, turkey, chicken, lamb or beef with vegetables

• Baked beans or bean salad

• Grated carrot, lettuce or tomato.

Include grainy bread or rolls, flat bread, fruit loaf or buns, bagels, corn or rice cakes, Turkish bread or crispbread. As an alternative try:

• Pasta – make a salad with lots of raw vegetables

• Rice – when making fried rice, minimise oil and add lots of steamed vegetables.

Foods best left out
Avoid chocolate spreads, jam and honey. Avoid fatty meats such as salami.

Biscuits and dips
Best choices
Wholemeal or multigrain dry biscuits, crispbreads, or rice cakes with yoghurt, hummus or vegetable dips.

Foods best left out
‘Oven baked’ and plain savoury biscuits are as high in salt and fat as chips.

Muffins and cakes
Try making your own healthy muffins and cakes. Include fruit and vegetables such as sultanas, carrot, zucchini, banana and pumpkin.

Foods best left out
Only offer donuts and cakes occasionally instead of in the lunch box.

Muesli and ‘breakfast’ bars
Almost all ‘bars’ are too high in sugar. Some high fibre cereal bars are better than chewy, high fat muesli type bars.
Try to avoid chocolate bars and muesli bars in lunch boxes. These are expensive and stuck together with fats and sugar.

Best drinks
Water and milk are the best drinks for children. They can be frozen to help keep foods in the lunch box cool.

All sweet drinks such as fruit juice, juice drinks, cordials, sports drinks, energy drinks, flavoured milk, flavoured mineral waters and soft drinks are high in sugar and are not necessary. These drinks can increase the risk of tooth decay, are ‘filling’ and may take the place of healthier foods.

Tips for busy families
Foods should be simple and easy to prepare, ‘ready to eat’ and appetising after several hours of storage in the lunch box.

Foods such as sandwiches can be prepared the night before or on the weekend, frozen then taken for each day’s lunch box. Suitable foods to freeze are: bread, cooked meat, cheese, baked beans.

Food safety
In most cases food is stored in your child’s lunch box for several hours, so the lunch box needs to be kept cool.

• Choose an insulated lunch box or one with a freezer pack, or include a wrapped frozen water bottle to keep the lunch box cool.

• Perishable foods such as dairy products, eggs and sliced meats should be kept cool, and eaten within about four hours of preparation. Don’t pack these foods if just cooked. First cool in the refrigerator overnight.

• If you include left over meals such as meats, pasta and rice dishes, ensure you pack a frozen iceblock into the lunch box.

Peer pressure
Children are influenced by food advertising, and their friends’ food choices.

Remember that not all children go to childcare or school with lunch boxes filled with chips and lollies, despite what children think and say! It is important to keep offering healthy lunch box choices in a variety of ways, as children learn to eat what is familiar to them. Remember that it may take time to change your child’s food preferences to more healthy choices.

Severe food allergy
If your child has a severe food allergy it is advised that you develop a management plan with your family doctor, the school or early childhood setting, teacher and class. The plan may include an agreement to limit common food allergens such as nuts, egg or wheat in the lunch boxes of all children (in the childcare or school class). The school or early childhood setting will notify other parents or carers if certain food or items need to be kept away from children and limited in the lunch box.

Important Lunch Box Tips

Best Choices

• Vegetables

• Fresh fruit

• Dairy food – cheese or yoghurt

• Protein food – slice of lean meat, hard boiled egg or beans

• Starch foods – bread, rice or pasta

• Water

Best Left Out

• Muesli and chocolate bars

• Potato crisps and oven baked savoury biscuits

• Sweet drinks

• Lollies, honey and jams

• Fatty meats such as salami

Courtesy of the Victoria Government, Australia

                                  

Along with a balanced diet and regular exercise, multivitamins are a good way to stay in good health. For just pennies a day, they may help lower your risk of cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis as well as prevent some birth defects. When undertaking body weight management, taking a multi-vitamin will keep you strong and healthy. Since you are changing your eating habits in one way or another, you want to make sure you are getting in a good amount of your essential vitamins and minerals. Look to include vitamins: A, D, E & B-Complex (B1, B2, B6, B12), minerals: calcium, magnesium, potassium, copper, manganese, chromium, zinc, iodine, boron, iron & selenium in addition to an anti-oxidant. There are many misconceptions about vitamins and the health benefits they offer.
Vitamins play an important role in keeping the body healthy. However, taking large doses of certain vitamins can actually be harmful. For most people, it is best to get the vitamins our bodies need from eating a variety of healthy, unprocessed foods rather than by taking supplements. Vitamin supplements are frequently misused and taken as a form of medicine to treat ailments such as colds or to counteract lifestyle issues such as stress. Contrary to popular belief, vitamins aren’t drugs or miracle cures. They are organic compounds that participate in various metabolic functions. High-dose supplements should not be taken unless recommended under medical advice. Isolating the ‘active ingredient’ is not the answer Proper balance and adequate levels of essential nutrients is important for a range of complex processes in our body. When vitamins are taken as supplements, they are introduced into the body at levels that could never be achieved by eating even the healthiest of diets. They are also sent in ‘alone’. When they occur in food, vitamins have many other companions to help them along the way. For instance, provitamin A (beta-carotene) in food is accompanied by hundreds of its carotenoid relatives. Simply taking a vitamin pill is not an instant fix for feeling run down or lacking in energy. It is the combination of a whole range of compounds (most of which we probably don’t even know about) in plant foods that gives us the protection. When you artificially remove one of them and provide it completely out of context, it may not be as effective and, in the case of some vitamins, can have negative effects
Recommended dietary intakes
 Many people mistakenly believe that since small amounts of vitamins are good for you, then large amounts must be better. In the case of vitamins, it is better to follow the rule of ‘less is more’. The vitamins A, D, E and K are fat soluble, which means they can be stored in the body. Taking high doses of these vitamins, especially vitamin A, over a long period of time can result in harmful levels in the body unless you have a medically diagnosed deficiency. Some of the water soluble vitamins can also cause side effects in high doses. For instance, vitamin B6 has been linked with nerve damage when taken in large doses. For a healthy adult, if supplements are used, they should generally be taken at levels close to the recommended dietary intake (RDI). High-dose supplements should not be taken unless recommended under medical advice. Deficiencies and illness
The human body is able to store vitamins. The fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K can be locked away in the liver and body fat and stored for a long time. The water soluble vitamins, including B-complex and vitamin C, are mostly only stored for a shorter period of time. A vitamin deficiency takes weeks or months before it will affect your health. For instance, it would take months of no vitamin C before you developed scurvy. An occasional lapse in good eating will not harm you if your usual diet consists of a wide variety of fresh foods.
Sometimes supplements are needed
 Supplements do have a role to play for some groups of people. For instance, people on long-term restrictive weight loss diets or people with malabsorption problems such as diarrhoea, coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis or pancreatitis can benefit from supplements. Folic acid supplements are strongly recommend for women planning a pregnancy to reduce the risk having a baby with neural tube defects, like spina bifida. People who are advised by their doctor that they need to take vitamin supplements are encouraged to consult an accredited dietitian, who can work with their doctor to provide dietary advice related to the person’s situation. If you need to take a supplement, it is best to take multivitamins at the recommended dietary level, rather than single nutrient supplements or high-dose multivitamins.
The common cold and vitamin C
Many people think that vitamin C helps prevent the common cold. Despite exhaustive research across the world, there is still no strong evidence to prove this. Some studies have shown that taking large doses of vitamin C (more than 1,000mg per day) continuously or at the start of a cold may ease some of the symptoms and the duration, on average, making it about half a day shorter. It does not prevent you catching a cold. You also need to consider the health risks associated with taking large doses of vitamin C. Large doses may cause nausea, abdominal cramps, headaches, fatigue, kidney stones and diarrhoea. It may also interfere with your body’s ability to process (metabolise) other nutrients – for example, it could lead to dangerously raised levels of iron. Excessive amounts of vitamin C in the body can also interfere with medical tests, such as diabetes tests, giving a false result. Adults need about 45mg of vitamin C per day and any excess amount is excreted. Stress, depression and anxiety Some vitamin and omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies can lead to emotional disturbances. However, if you are feeling run down, it is more likely to be due to stress, depression or unhealthy lifestyle habits (such as insufficient sleep or smoking) rather than a vitamin deficiency. Feeling under pressure doesn’t automatically lead to a vitamin deficiency, so taking a vitamin supplement won’t necessarily make the stressful feelings go away. More serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, aren’t caused or prevented by vitamins, although a healthy diet and good nutrient intake can help support a person to better cope with their condition.
Vitamin E and heart disease
Vitamin E is widely promoted as a beneficial antioxidant that can help prevent heart disease. Unfortunately, several large-scale reviews have conclusively found no evidence that vitamin E supplements prevent death from heart disease. In fact, there may be greater risk of all-cause death from taking such supplements.
Cancer cures
Vitamin A in large doses does not cure cancer and can be toxic, particularly if taken as pills rather than food. There is some evidence that vitamin E could play a small role in preventing some cancers although, equally, there is evidence that it could hasten the onset of other types of cancer; however, this has not been conclusively proved or disproved. While it is argued by some that megadoses of antioxidants can help with the effectiveness of conventional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the evidence is far from supporting this. In fact, it has been shown that megadoses of antioxidants can actually interfere with some medical treatments of cancer by helping to protect the cancer cells that the therapies aim to eradicate.
Some research findings
A number of studies into supplement use have shown negative findings. For instance: Vitamin A (beta-carotene) was thought to reduce the risk of some cancers but has been linked to an increase in others, such as lung cancer in smokers, if taken in supplement form. Several long-term studies have shown that prostate, breast and lung cancer risk are not decreased by taking high-dose supplements containing vitamins E or C or selenium. People taking high-dose vitamin E supplements have been found to have higher rates of early death (mortality).
Anti-ageing vitamins
Vitamin E is often singled out as the potential fountain of youth. However, there is no evidence that taking large doses of any vitamin can either stall or reverse the effects of ageing. Neither can any one vitamin restore a flagging sex drive or cure infertility. Vitamins and chronic disease
In developed countries, vitamin deficiency is rare but the inadequate intake of some vitamins is not so rare and has been linked to a number of chronic diseases. These include cardiovascular disease, cancer and osteoporosis. There is ongoing research to study the effects of taking vitamin supplements to prevent chronic disease, and evidence around nutrition and diet is constantly changing. It is important you consult with your doctor before taking vitamin supplements in high doses.
Things to remember
Vitamins are not drugs or miracle cures. Taking large doses of vitamins can be harmful because your body only needs vitamins in very tiny amounts. Eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and cereals will give your body most of the vitamins your body needs at the right level and in the right balance. Vitamin supplements can’t replace a healthy diet, but a general multivitamin may help if your diet is inadequate.
People who may need vitamin supplements include pregnant and breastfeeding women, people who consume alcohol in amounts over the recommended level, drug users and the elderly.