Healthy Eating: Benefits of a Balanced Diet
Healthy Eating: Benefits of a Balanced Diet
New Marketlink Pharmaceutical Corporation is dedicated to promoting overall well-being, and a key component of that is healthy eating. In this discussion, we’ll explore the benefits of a balanced diet, highlighting how the right nutritional choices can enhance your energy, improve your health, and support a vibrant lifestyle. Let’s dive into how making smart food decisions can positively impact every aspect of your life.
A healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition.
It protects you against many chronic noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
A healthy diet comprises a combination of different foods. These include:
- Staples like cereals (wheat, barley, rye, maize, feor rice) or starchy tubers or roots (potato, yam, taro, or cassava).
- Legumes (lentils and beans).
- Fruit and vegetables.
- Foods from animal sources (meat, fish, eggs, and milk).
Here is some useful information, based on WHO recommendations, to follow a healthy diet, and the benefits of doing so.
1.Breastfeed babies and young children:
- A healthy diet starts early in life – breastfeeding fosters healthy growth, and may have longer-term health benefits, like reducing the risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing noncommunicable diseases later in life.
- Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from birth to 6 months of life is important for a healthy diet.
2. Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit:
- They are important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, plant protein and antioxidants.
- People with diets rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.
3. Eat less fat:
- Fats and oils and concentrated sources of energy. Eating too much, particularly the wrong kinds of fat, like saturated and industrially produced trans-fat, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
- Using unsaturated vegetable oils (olive, soy, sunflower, or corn oil) rather than animal fats or oils high in saturated fats (butter, ghee, lard, coconut, and palm oil) will help consume healthier fats.
4. Limit intake of sugars:
- For a healthy diet, sugars should represent less than 10% of your total energy intake. Reducing even further to under 5% has additional health benefits.
- Choosing fresh fruits instead of sweet snacks such as cookies, cakes and chocolate helps reduce consumption of sugars. Limiting intake of soft drinks, soda and other drinks high in sugar.
5. Reduce salt intake:
- Keeping your salt intake to less than 5g per day helps prevent hypertension and reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke in the adult population.
- Limiting the amount of salt and high-sodium condiments (soy sauce and fish sauce) when cooking and preparing foods helps reduce salt intake.