A balanced diet is necessary for both good nutrition and health.
There are many foods that are both pleasant and healthful. Your meals will be colorful, adaptable, and healthy if you pile your plate high with fruits, vegetables, quality protein sources, and other whole foods.
You are shielded from a variety of degenerative noncommunicable diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. A balanced diet that limits salt, sugar, saturated fats, and trans fats from industrial production is crucial for good health.
A balanced diet consists of a variety of foods. These consist of:
- staples such as grains (wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rice) or starchy roots or tubers (potato, yam, taro or cassava).
- Legumes (lentils and beans) (lentils and beans).
- Veggies and fruits.
- foods derived from animals (meat, fish, eggs, and milk).
Here is some helpful information about maintaining a healthy diet and its advantages, based on WHO standards.
- Breastfeeding infants and young children: Breastfeeding promotes healthy growth and may have long-term health benefits, such as lowering the chance of becoming overweight or obese and developing noncommunicable diseases later in life. A balanced diet starts early in life.
- For a balanced diet, it’s crucial to only provide breast milk to infants for the first six months of their lives. Additionally, it’s crucial to start introducing a variety of healthy complementary foods to your child at the age of six months and to continue breastfeeding until your child is at least two years old.
Reduce intake of oil.
Eat less fat because it is concentrated energy that is found in fats and oils. Consuming excessive amounts of fat, especially trans fat made in factories and saturated fat, can raise your chance of developing heart disease and stroke.
It is possible to consume healthy fats by substituting animal fats or oils with a high saturated fat content (butter, ghee, lard, coconut, and palm oil) with unsaturated vegetable oils (olive, soy, sunflower, or maize oil).
Consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person’s total energy intake in order to prevent unhealthful weight gain.
Limit sugar intake because it might;
- Sugars should make up less than 10% of your overall energy intake for a healthy diet. Additional health advantages come from cutting the amount even more, down below 5%.
- Consuming less sugar is made easier by selecting fresh fruit over sweet snacks like cookies, cakes, and chocolate.
- It also aids in reducing sugar intake to limit consumption of sugar-rich beverages such as yoghurt drinks, fruit juices, cordials, and syrups.
Remember to be cautious about your salt intake;
- In adults, limiting salt consumption to less than 5 grams per day lowers the risk of heart disease and stroke and helps prevent hypertension.
- Salt consumption can be decreased by limiting salt and high-sodium seasonings like soy sauce and fish sauce when preparing food.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF FOLLOWING A HEALTHY DIET?
A healthy diet is consumed throughout the life course and aids in preventing a number of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and illnesses, as well as malnutrition in all of its manifestations. However, there has been a change in dietary patterns as a result of increased production of processed foods, growing urbanisation, and changing lifestyles.
Nowadays, individuals eat more meals that are heavy in calories, fats, free sugars, and sodium/sodium, and many people eat insufficient amounts of fruit, vegetables, and other dietary fiber-rich foods like whole grains.
Depending on individual characteristics (such as age, gender, lifestyle, and level of physical activity), cultural context, regionally accessible foods, and dietary habits, a diversified, balanced, and healthy diet will take on different compositions. But the fundamental ideas of what makes up a healthy diet stay the same.
For a healthy young adult
Fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and whole grains, such as lentils and beans (e.g. unprocessed maize, millet, oats, wheat and brown rice).
daily intake of at least 400 g (five servings) of fruit and vegetables, omitting potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, and other starchy roots.
Less than 10% of total energy intake from free sugars, which is equal to 50 g (or roughly 12 level teaspoons) for a person of healthy body weight consuming about 2000 calories per day, but preferably is less than 5% of total energy intake for added health advantages.
All added sugars to food or beverages, whether by the producer, cook, or consumer, as well as sugars found naturally in honey, syrups, fruit juices, and fruit juice concentrates, are considered free sugars.
Less than 30% of your daily calories should come from fat. Saturated fats, which are present in fatty meat, butter, palm and coconut oil, cream, cheese, ghee, and lard, as well as trans-fats of all kinds, including ruminant trans-fats, are to be avoided.
These fats can also be found in baked and fried foods, as well as in pre-packaged snacks and foods like frozen pizza, pies, cookies, biscuits, wafers, and cooking oils and spreads (found in meat and dairy foods from ruminant animals, such as cows, sheep, goats and camels).
It is advised that trans fat intake be kept to 1% of total energy intake and saturated fat intake to less than 10% of total energy intake. Particularly, trans-fats generated industrially should not be consumed as part of a balanced diet.
less than 5 g of salt every day, or roughly 1 teaspoon. Iodized salt should be used.
For young healthy infants
In a child’s first two years of life, a nutritious diet promotes growth and enhances cognitive development. Additionally, it lowers the chance of gaining weight or being obese later in life and acquiring NCDs.
While recommendations for a nutritious diet for babies and young children are similar to those for adults, the following factors are also crucial:
- During the first six months of life, infants should only be breastfed.
- Up to age 2 and beyond, infants should only be breastfed.
- Breast milk should be supplemented with a variety of adequate, secure, and nutrient-rich foods starting at 6 months of age. Complementary foods shouldn’t have salt or sugar added.
WHAT FOODS SHOULD BE CONSUMED?
Fruits and vegetables-
The risk of NCDs is decreased by eating at least 400 g, or five pieces, of fruit and vegetables every day , and it also helps to ensure that one consumes enough dietary fibre each day.
Vegetables should always be a part of your meals, and you should also eat seasonal fruit and veggies as well as fresh fruit and raw vegetables for snacks.
Fats-
In order to prevent harmful weight gain in adults, total fat intake should be reduced to less than 30% of total energy intake. The following factors also reduce the likelihood of getting NCDs:
lowering saturated fats to less than 10% of total energy consumption, trans fats to less than 1% of total energy intake, and substituting unsaturated fats, particularly polyunsaturated fats, for both saturated and trans fats.
Salt, sodium and potassium-
The majority of individuals don’t get enough potassium and consume too much sodium through salt (9–12 g on average per day) (less than 3.5 g). High blood pressure is a result of consuming too much sodium and not enough potassium, which raises the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Every year, 1.7 million fatalities may be avoided if salt consumption was reduced to the recommended amount of less than 5 g per day .
Salt-
Less than 10% of total calorie consumption, in both adults and children, should come from free sugars. Additional health advantages would result from lowering intake to less than 5% of total calories.
The risk of dental caries rises when free sugars are consumed (tooth decay). The intake of too many calories from meals and beverages with a lot of free sugars also causes unhealthy weight growth, which can result in overweight and obesity.
Recent research suggests that reducing free sugar intake lowers risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and that free sugars affect blood pressure and serum lipids.
