How Our Kids Eat Now Affects Lifelong Health

So you've tried to get your kids to eat their fruits and veggies and if they didn't, oh well.  But a new study is showing that what kids eat when they're growing up is vital to their health long-term.

Of course, the study was done on fruit flies but scientists promise it applies to us.  And the big surprise?  Protein is more important than sugar ;-).
 In a finding that could very well have application to human beings, researchers "discovered that a larval diet that’s predominantly protein is better than a diet of sugar when it comes to the reproduction and development of the next generation of the small flies, which count human-like metabolism among their many biological similarities."

Mother flies that grew up eating protein gave birth to more offspring and these infant flies were healthier and stronger than females grown as larvae on a diet that mostly included sugar, according to newswise.com.

The doctors on the research team lambasted our current diet, and compared it “to where we have almost pre-digested food," Dr. Luciano Matzkin, assistant professor and director of the graduate program in the UAH Department of Biological Sciences, was quoted by the Web site. This has altered human nutrition for all time, he added.

The change to a protein diet may even lower the rise of asthma, allergies, juvenile onset diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome.

"We know that the environment in which an organism develops can affect the performance of that organism. And we know that human beings have shifted their diet dramatically,” Dr. Matzkin told newswise.com.








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