Healthy Eating

Healthy eating is a journey, not a destination. It is one of those things where you learn as you go along. You need to put in a bit of effort and plan ahead. For most people you can tell how healthy they are, not by looking at their body, but by looking at what is in their supermarket trolley. Healthy eating starts by what you buy so shop for the recommended 5 portions of fruit and veg a day.

The only healthy way to loose weight or maintain a healthy weight is to eat healthily. This is not a diet; it is a way of life. It is not something you stop and start. It should be a joy, not a punishment, but even the nutritionists and the cooks don’t say it’s easy, though perhaps we should all say “You’re worth it!”.

Is the balanced diet a myth? Well, when you come to actually look at the quality of the food we eat in a balanced diet you start to be shocked. The nutrient content of foods has decreased significantly over the last 50 years because intensive farming takes out the crop from the soil, but does not replace the nutrients in the soil that the crop has taken out, so every year the nutrient content of the next crop is not as good. Also crops are harvested before they mature, and are then forced in storage to look good, but are nutritionally not so good. This is not good news, and achieving a balanced diet that give you the nutrition you need is now really hard.

Healthy eating is something we should all be practicing throughout our lives. The effect of our diet begins before we are born. The diet of each of us at the point when we conceive a baby has an effect on the health of that baby throughout its life. Healthy eating during pregnancy before the birth of the baby is important, as is nutrition for nutrition for babies , nutrition for children and nutrition for adults . At any stage of life optimum nutrition is what brings optimum health.

What about vitamin and mineral supplements? The argument continues. Your doctor will tell you that you don’t need them, because you should get all the nutrition you need from a balanced diet, but then the average doctor only got a day’s training on nutrition to qualify, and most of us don’t eat a balanced diet. The nutritionist takes nutrition more seriously, having studied nutrition for years, and stresses the healthy diet. However in the real world we all eat less than an ideal diet, but we can take out our own ‘health insurance’ by taking a good quality multivitamin and multimineral supplement for adults every day.

When we get over 50 we need extra help from our supplements and a range of supplements as multivitamins for 50+ years have been developed to cater for this.