Nutrition is such an evolving field that new ideas come and go almost every day and leave us completely and utterly confused. Let’s look at some of those and see if they are still standing.

1. You need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day they said.

- Not such a good advice as far as nutrition is concerned. If you live in a very hot climate you have to make sure you are getting enough water to compensate for what you lost through perspiration. But in normal circumstances – drink when you feel thirsty.

- Any kind of liquid is good to keep the water levels in your body in check. What so much water does is dilutes your electrolytes and makes you feel full. You are advised to drink that amount if you want to lose weight.

About 30 years ago a young cardiology doctor called Robert C. Atkins came up with a revolutionary diet plan he named after himself.
The basis of this plan was the idea that we are not getting fat from the fat in our food. How else, he said, would we explain the obesity in the United Stated, where there are so many low fat foods?

The culprits, he uncovered, are the carbohydrates. Those building blocks turn into glucose and if we do not use all of that energy on physical activity, it turns into fat and accumulates in our bodies.

Therefore his diet is based on a few or no carbohydrates at all. You can eat as much proteins (meat and animal products) as you like and you can eat as much fat as you like, as long as you avoid carbohydrates you will lose weight.

This is a relatively new diet, conceived by a cardiologist Dr. Arthur Agatston and a dietician Marie Almon as a way to help his patients prevent heart disease and stay healthy. It became known as a weight lose diet only in the beginning of 2000.

The idea behind this diet is the glycemic cycle happening in our bodies when we eat. When we consume sugars and carbohydrates, the body produces insulin to break the sugars down. The more sugars we eat, the more insulin is produced.

The doctor theorized that this causes a cycle; we eat sugars, insulin breaks it down and when there is no more sugar to break down, we feel hungry and eat again. If we prevent the spike in insulin production we will avoid the hunger feeling that causes us to eat more of that same food.

In today’s world, in the United States for example, the percentage of obesity in adults, and especially in children has reached the highest level it has ever been.

With so many diets on the market and gyms in every corner, the question that keeps coming up is, why? Why is this generation so overweight when we have all those new exercise techniques and sport research to maximize the exercise effectiveness?
The simple answer is nutrition. People just do not know how to eat right.