Healthy eating

The human body needs a balanced diet to deliver vital nutrients

What’s your idea of a perfect meal? Sushi? A large piece of cake followed by hot chocolate? Even if it satisfies your appetite, it’s unlikely to fulfil all your nutritional needs.

Cutting through the myriad of diet plans and faddish eating regimes, the human body needs a balanced, healthy eating plan to keep functioning properly. This helps ensure that our bodies have enough nutrition to:

• Grow and build
• Repair and heal
• Reproduce successfully
• Repel illnesses and infections
• Avoid weight-related health problems

Eating a variety of foods can also reduce the risk of getting conditions including heart disease, stroke, some cancers, diabetes and osteoporosis.

What foods do our bodies need to stay healthy?

The foods we need to eat can be divided into five separate groups.

Food Group	Main nutritional benefits	How much should we have each day?
Fruit and vegetables(Includes fresh, frozen, juiced, dried or tinned fruit and vegetables)	Vitamins, minerals and fibre	Five portions
Starchy foods(Includes bread, rice, pasta and potatoes)	Energy, fibre, and vitamins and minerals	A third of everything we eat
Meat, fish, eggs and beans(Includes fresh meat, fresh and tinned fish, eggs, nuts and pulses)	Protein and vitamins and minerals	Two to three portions (one portion is an egg or a serving of meat/fish the size of a deck of cards)
Milk and dairy foods(Includes milk, cheese and yoghurt)	Protein and calcium	Two to three portions (one portion is a small pot of yoghurt or glass of milk)
Foods containing fat and sugar(Includes cakes, biscuits and fizzy drinks)	Energy	One portion (two biscuits or a small chocolate bar)

Why do we need these nutrients?

The reason we need a diet drawn from all of the groups is that they all deliver different, but vital, nutritional benefits to our bodies.

Fruit and vegetables are one of our main sources of vitamins and minerals, which the body needs to perform a variety of functions well. For instance, vitamin A helps to strengthen our immune system, B vitamins help us process energy from food, vitamin D helps us maintain healthy teeth and bones, and vitamin C helps to keep cells and tissues healthy. The steamed carrots and broccoli, pictured above, will maintain a higher proportion of vitamins than boiled or fried vegetables.

Fruit and vegetables (eaten with the skin on) also contain high amounts of fibre which help to maintain a healthy gut and digestive system.

Starchy foods, also known as carbohydrates, are where we get most of our energy from. Our bodies convert these foods into glucose which is used as energy either immediately or stored for later use.

Carbohydrates also contain fibre (especially wholegrain), and iron which we need to make red blood cells to carry oxygen around the body.

Meat fish, eggs and pulses provide us with significant amounts of protein which is essentially a building block of the body. Everything from our hair, muscles, nerves, skin and nails needs protein to build and repair itself. The grilled mackerel, pictured, is an excellent source.

Also high in protein are dairy products, and they are also great providers of calcium. The most common mineral in the body, calcium is needed for functions including helping blood to clot, and to build bones and teeth.

Fortunately, the fatty and sugary group, the foods that we find the most irresistible, also have a role to play, in moderation. Fat transports the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K around the body. It also cushions and protects the internal organs.

Sugar is another food that gives us energy, whether it’s the naturally occurring fructose sugars in fruit or sucrose in table sugar. But, “other sources of carbohydrate, for example starchy foods, are a better choice for the nutrients they provide”, says Lydia Kelly.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14