So, when we look at food and the functions that food fulfills in our lives, we can sort of separate this into two equally important categories. The first category is nutrition. So food provides us with nutrition. It's, it's fuel, right? You've heard the saying, food is fuel and it fuels our bodies. It, it fuels our physical activities. It helps us to think and it helps our bodies to repair certain parts when they're damaged and they need repair. Of course, it helps us to grow and maintain our bodies. So, this is one really important part of the equation. But on the other side, we have the social functions of food. From the smallest families. From the first day of life, and up to the most, kind of extended social networks. Food is a way of communicating. It's a way of showing care for one another. It's a way of celebrating together. It's also a way of passing on our family's history and our traditions. And all of these things fall under the side of the equation that I would call the social functions of food. But let's go over on to this nutrition side once again and just to look at kind of the big picture of what we get from food on this side. So the first thing we need from our food in terms of nutrition, and we sometimes forget about this, is water. We are actually, human beings are made up of 50% water by weight. And water faciltieates all of the bodily functions we need to survive. So water is, is really important and sometimes we forget about that. Then the next thing we need, is energy. And we get energy from our food in the form of something called macronutrients. And they're called macronutrients because we need a relativity larger amount of these compared to the micronutrients that we'll talk about in a minute. But macronutrients, I bet you've heard of them, They are things like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. So, just to give you some examples, carbohydrates are kind of combinations of little sugars that are linked together in ways, by chemical bonds and those bonds store energy in them, so when our body digests a slice of bread, it releases energy that we can use. And then protein provides us with some energy, but also with important building blocks or repair and maintenance in growth in our bodies. Fats, the last of these categories of macronutrients, provides us with a large amount of energy. So it's a, it's a good storage form for energy, but that also means that it's easy to sometimes overcompensating. Take in too much energy in the form of fats. But fats are very necessary, they're necessary for a whole bunch of bodily processes, and we'll talk about those in, in another video later on. So, the next things we need are micronutrients, and I bet you've heard of these, too. These are things like vitamins and minerals. And vitamins are organic substances made by plants or animals and minerals are inorganic elements that come from the earth, soil, and water, and they're absorbed by plants. So animals and humans absorb minerals from the plants that they eat. And both vitamins and minerals are micronutrients that a body needs to grow, to repair, and to function normally. The last thing that we have to add to this list is dietary fiber, and fiber is a really important part of the diet. It's sometimes called ruffage, but it's basically the indigestible part of plant foods, the part that our digestive tract can't break down and absorb. And it protects the health of our digestive tract. It also helps us to remove waste from the body, and we'll talk about fiber a little bit more and the different types of fiber in a, in a later segment as well. If we look at the other side, at the social functions of food, we see that food provides a very powerful means of communication. When we eat together with other people, we communicate. We become integrated into a family or into a society through the act, just the act, of sharing a meal. And those social connections that we solidify, that we establish, by spending time around a table and eating and talking together, they actually contribute to the emotional health of our children. There's quite a bit of, of research saying that children who eat family meals actually do better in terms of their emotional well-being. And finally, eating together and, doing that over time for many, many years is a way in which we pass on our families traditions. A way in which we record our memories and pass those on. And a way in which we sort of take the history of the generation that came before us and pass it on to the next generation. So while we recognize the importance of the nutritional contribution of food. Food is fueled yes. It certainly is. And we recognize that it's critical to our short and long term survival, but we can't forget the huge contribution of food and the way in which we eat to the survival and the development of us as social beings beginning really from the first day that a child is born and someone provides that child with food. [BLANK_AUDIO]
