Being Alive; July 1997
Jennifer Jensen, MS, RD

For our primary ground-level foods, we have lots of choices. Start with the starches: Breads and grains. Other grain-based complex carbohydrates include pastas, rice, oats, barley, legumes, cereals, crackers, whole-grain muffins, bagels, and starchy vegetables like corn, yams and potatoes. Members of the starch family are high in B-complex vitamins, lots of key minerals, and other naturally-occurring nutrients. Other grain products like cakes, cookies, croissants and high-fat muffins are on the dessert menualong with other fats and sugars. (Sorry L.)

Garden of Paradise

Our second-priority food category is the produce familyfruits and vegetables. For this, go to the produce section of your store; there's powerful nutrition growing thereway powerful! Strategy is so easyit's downright hard to miss the good stuff: Go for color! Phytochemicals, food parts that have medicinal qualities, are often highly colorful; the phyto-carotenoids, for example, are colorspigments.

Beta carotene is a famous antioxidant, and it's also a good supplement to take. But beta's only one of the "carotenoid" family of about 500 relatives; beta-carotene is sort ofcarrot colored! Eating a variety of colors from the supermarket produce garden will give you the best from a wide range of carotenoids and, if you enjoy them, delight your taste buds with a rainbow of different natural colors. This is truly an inspired botanical selection technique!

For starters, head for the fruit rainbow which contains cantaloupe, peaches, nectarines, red and black grapes, cherries, berries and lots more. Or just eat plain less-color fruits like bananas, white grapes, pears and apples. Be creative: Mix blueberries with strawberries and some peeled apples, and you're ready for the 4th of July! For colorful vegetables, look for greens; get collard, mustard, and turnip greens, broccoli, and green peppers. Then add yellowspeppers, squashes, and sweet potatoes. Move to the reds with red peppers, beets, and tomatoes.

To get healthy amounts from the garden, eat a minimum of 3 fruit and 4 vegetable servings every day. A fruit serving is an average orange, apple, peach or pear. For berries and melon chunks, use the one-cup method. For veggies, a serving size is "one cup raw, or a half cup cooked." Vegetables tend to shrink when they get cooked.

For some conditions, like diarrhea, limit fiber. This could wipe out most of the fun in your produce garden. The only safe things are bananas and peeled apples, pears, peaches, and nectarines. Starchy vegetables like peeled potatoes and yams are OK, pureed veggies will do (baby food section) and juiced vegetables are wonderful for concentrated nutrient delivery. Since a pound of carrots makes only a cup of carrot juice, you've gotta know that there's high nutrient potential in juicing; the fiber from that many carrots would give anyone diarrhea!

Protein Power

It's not exactly a secret that we need far more protein than negatives. Protein from dairy and eggs represents the so-called "gold-standard" in judging quality. After that, the meat/meat alternate group chimes in at about 70-90% of "gold" but vegetarian sources tend to rank from 40-down, not as high as I often wish they were.

Vegetarianism is a commendable practice. I subscribe to most of the beliefs and reasons for a vegetarian lifestyle, and have eaten a vegetarian diet over many (prior) years. But hiv carries its own high-level protein requirements, and it would be difficult for non-nutritionists to manage the quantity and quality issues. Since many vegetarians do eat eggs, dairy products, and maybe fish, hiv-level protein needs can be easily met. Still, if you want to go vegetarian, I recommend that you get good balancing advice from an hiv-savvy nutritionist; it's a healthcare "must"worthy of the effort (and cost).

For protein, the best hiv-specific estimate (for now, anyway) is to eat about one gram of protein every day for each pound of body weight. Applied to milk and other dairy, you'll get about 8-9 grams per serving. There are about 25 grams in a 3.5-ounce chicken breast, and around 45 grams from a steak or fish filet about the size of your hand (56 ounces). Nutrients from red meats include iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B6, other B-vitamins and lots of minerals. The body does not store extra protein from today to use tomorrow; we have to eat our quota every day. If you didn't know this before, it really is trueI wouldn't risk my professional reputation on this if I couldn't prove it.

I don't advocate eating unappetizing food, and I don't recommend candy-bingeing or grease-gorging either. But if there's something you really really love, and it's totally sinful and unabashedly wicked with sweet, greasy, slimy calories, do not deprive yourself of this food. Just don't eat it often; save it for very special occasions. For better health, make sure that your regular diet is built from the bottom-up.

Unnecessary Diet Restrictions

There's probably nothing worse than worrying about an extra shake of the salter or the cholesterol in your hard-cooked egg when you don't have to. Salt probably won't hurt you a bit. In fact, it may be a good idea to get salt into your body. Dehydration is a health threat in any warm climatelike summer. Eating salty foods will make you thirsty, you'll drink to quench the thirst, and the salt will help your body hold onto the water. And cholesterolnever even was a big issue with hiv/aids , but many people don't know that. Eat eggs if you want and have lobster and shrimp (well-done). Note, however, that some of the protease inhibitors (e.g., ritonavir) can cause blood cholesterol to rise. When the blood in anyone's body is loaded with cholesterol, that's a heart disease risk; watch your labs carefullythey have good, important informationand do check with your doctor or nutritionist if you're not sure.

A common food-eating obstruction is what I call "chemo-phobia"intense fear of food additives like artificial flavors, colors and preservatives. Let's examine just what it is we're avoiding, and why. One of the standard chemo-phobias is about food preservatives like BHT and BHA. They're often found in snack foods like potato, corn and tortilla chips. And they're both antioxidants which, if you wanted to, you could purchase as a supplement (go to the store and see for yourself!).

While I wouldn't recommend taking supplements of BHT or BHA, I also wouldn't discourage eating a food because it had some in it. There are lots of safe additives like carrageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum and others. Long, hard-to-pronounce names also could be good, or badoops! Let's step back here, just a bit, and look at the big picture.

Here we are, already knocking down handfuls of drugs that nobody really knows a lot aboutshort or long term. As research keeps coming up with newer and better medications that we also don't know very much about, we'll take them anyway. For example, note compassionate use programs and speed-ups on drug approvals. We're knocking down chemicals that are totally, completely foreign to almost everyone, including Nature! But, sometimes with a little luck, a positive outlook, and good nutrition, health improvement will happen.

So, you're still worried about a little artificial something? Get into perspective: take some pyridoxal-5-phosphate and call me in the morning! (Pyridoxal-5-phosphate is Vitamin B6.)

First do no harm. If any of this advice is, or seems to be, connected to adverse consequences, contact your doctor or dietitian/nutritionist.

Jennifer Jensen, MS, MBA, RD, is in private practice, Santa Monica, CA. She always provides a sliding scale for affordable nutrition advice. Call anytime at 310.450.5581, or send e-mail to NutPower@aol.com

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