WHY HEALTHY EATING IS IMPORTANT?

Healthy eating contributes to an overall sense of well-being and is a cornerstone in the prevention of a number of conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, dental caries, and asthma. For children and young people, healthy eating is particularly essential for healthy growth and cognitive development. Eating behaviors adopted during this period are likely to be maintained into adulthood, underscoring the importance of encouraging healthy eating as early as possible.

It’s a simple, obvious truth. You need food for the basics of everyday life to pump blood, move muscles, think thoughts. But what you eat and drink can also help you live well and live longer. By making the right choices, you can avoid some of the things we think of as inevitable penalties of getting older. Eating well teamed with keeping your weight in the healthy range, exercising regularly, and not smoking can prevent 80 percent of heart attacks, 90 percent of type 2 diabetes, and 70 percent of colorectal cancer.

It can also help you avoid stroke, osteoporosis, constipation, and other digestive woes, cataracts, and aging-related memory loss or dementia. And the benefits aren’t just for the future. A healthy diet can give you more energy and help you feel good today. Making poor dietary choices overeating of the wrong kinds of food and too little of the right kinds or too much food altogether can send you in the other direction, increasing your chances of developing one or more chronic conditions or dying early. An unhealthy diet during pregnancy can cause some congenital disabilities and may even influence a baby’s health into adulthood and old age. When it comes to diet, knowing what’s good and what’s bad isn’t always easy. The food industry spends billions of dollars a year to influence your choices, mostly in the wrong direction

Diet gurus promote the latest fads, most of which are less than healthy, while the media serves up near-daily helpings of flip-flopping nutrition news. Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants also offer conflicting advice, as do cereal boxes and thousands of websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and tweets. Healthy eating contributes to an overall sense of well-being and is a cornerstone in the prevention of a number of conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, dental caries, and asthma. For children and young people, healthy eating is particularly important for healthy growth and cognitive development. Eating behaviors adopted during this period are likely to be maintained into adulthood, underscoring the importance of encouraging healthy eating as early as possible.

Conclusion

An important take-home message is to focus on the types of foods you eat and your overall dietary pattern, instead of on individual nutrients such as fat, dietary cholesterol, or specific vitamins. There are no single nutrients or vitamins that can make you healthy. Instead, there is a shortlist of key food types that together can dramatically reduce your risk for heart disease. -Eat more of these foods: fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish and seafood, vegetable oils, beans, nuts, and seeds. – Eat less of these foods: whole milk and other full-fat dairy foods, red meat, processed meats, highly refined and processed grains and sugars, and sugary drinks.