Importance of Good Nutrition
Your food choices each day affect your health — how you feel today, tomorrow, and in the future.
Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle. Combined with physical activity, your diet can help you to reach and maintain a healthy weight, reduce your risk of chronic diseases (like heart disease and cancer), and promote your overall health.
The Impact of Nutrition on Your Health
Even for people at a healthy weight, a poor diet is associated with major health risks that can cause illness and even death. These include heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and certain types of cancer. By making smart food choices, you can help protect yourself from these health problems.
The risk factors for adult chronic diseases, like hypertension and type 2 diabetes, are increasingly seen in younger ages, often a result of unhealthy eating habits and increased weight gain. Dietary habits established in childhood often carry into adulthood, so teaching children how to eat healthy at a young age will help them stay healthy throughout their life.
The link between good nutrition and healthy weight, reduced chronic disease risk, and overall health is too important to ignore. By taking steps to eat healthy, you’ll be on your way to getting the nutrients your body needs to stay healthy, active, and strong. As with physical activity, making small changes in your diet can go a long way, and it’s easier than you think!
Today we seem to go through life feeling tired, needing a nap after we have eaten or feeling overweight and bloated; with intestinal gas, stomach upset or heartburn; with dull and slow thinking; feeling depressed or highly emotional — the list goes on. However, if we look at what we are eating and drinking, in many ways, we are affected by what we eat.
The modern diet
With modern lifestyles our eating habits have changed dramatically. We consume more packaged and processed foods and although they appear nutritious there are far less than they appear. We consume excessive amounts of harmful ingredients like food additives.
Food rich in sugar can also lead to many physical and emotional disorders, including:
-
- Hyperactivity in children and adults
- Aggression and violence
- Inability to think clearly and concentrate
- Diabetes
- Heart disease
- Some fats are healthy, while others are not, such as saturated fats found in meat, whole-milk dairy products (cheese, margarine, milk, and eggs), and it is this type of fat that raises total blood cholesterol levels.
Most modern processed and cooked foods are nutritionally deficient. You can take food and prepare it in such a way that it ceases to be food. Although we could live on refined food to a certain point, our capability to fight viruses and infection would be compromised. Therefore we need to eat a balanced and nutritious diet of food that is properly prepared.
So what should we eat?
The rule is to choose foods that are as natural as possible. Do a little research and go beyond the advertising to gain knowledge on the true ingredients in the product. Are all the health claims made by manufacturers true? All it takes is a simple search to know the truth.
Food and disease
Health and disease are directly linked to what we eat and as all disease originates at the cellular level, healthy cells create healthy tissues, healthy organs, healthy heart and healthy skin. Therefore, what is going to nourish those cells and how well they protect and heal themselves depends on the food we eat. No matter what you do, unless you properly nourish these cells, you cannot improve your health.
The major benefits of good nutrients include:
-
- Increased energy
- Clearer thinking
- You will sleep better
- You will enjoy life and live longer!
There is much greater awareness today and we can help ourselves and our families reduce the risk of disease to maintain optimum health. We can take greater control of our health through the food choices we make, knowing that some foods provide specific health benefits. Good food choices are important not only to our present health but to our health and wellbeing later in life.
@Fogiene, we take our role in educating consumers and manufacturers alike on the benefits of safe food very seriously. Contact us for a free consultation…from Nutritional Labelling to Shelf Life studies, our experts are there to assist you.
Recent Comments