DiEt aNd HeaLTh

Recently, I was cleaning up my room and when I unpacked a box filled up with books, I found one of my favorite book when I was in university. It is Food and Nutrition by Anita Tull, B. Ed, M. Sc. This book had been such a great help for my grades back in class and also filled with great informations. I want to share you some for it might be helpful for you.

You would all agree that food is vital to life. The book is defining food as any solid or liquid substance which, when taken by the body, provides it with the necessary material to enable it to grow, to replace worn-out and damaged parts, and to function normally.

Our body is like a complex piece of machinery that is prone to faults and weaknesses if it is poorly maintained. This can happen if too little or too much food is eaten, or if the daily food intake is in any way unbalanced.

Those people who are fortunate enough to have a choice of food to eat, have the opportunities to choose a healthy and varied food intake, and to control their eating habits. But how that choice is made, however, depends on several different factors, that some of which may be more influential than health consideration. Those factors are : personal likes and dislikes; religious and moral beliefs, social custom and tradition; food availability and variety on sale; cost; physical needs of the body; time available to shop for and prepare food; storage, preparation, and cooking facilities; our perception of food, what our senses tell us about it; food science and technology; and advertising.

One way of ensuring that health and fitness are maintained, when food is plentiful, is to have an understanding of food and its effects on the body and to use this knowledge wisely.

Food like other substances, is composed of different chemical elements, arranged in a variety of ways to form molecules. These molecules collectively give individual foods their flavour, colour, and texture, and affect their reaction to heat and their digestion. In addition, there are molecules in food which the body uses in order to function correctly and to stay healthy. These are the nutrients.

There are many different nutrients, and each has its own function in the body. Each nutrient is vital to life, and the health of an individual will suffer if any one nutrient is in short supply. Most food contain more than one nutrient, and are therefore of use to the body in several ways. Some foods, such as sugar, contain only one nutrient, and are of limited use to the body. However, no single food provides all the nutrients required by the body in sufficient quantities. SO, a variety of foods must be eaten.



source : Food and Nutrition by Anita Tull, B. Ed, M. Sc