What is a healthy balanced diet

You here so much on the news and also read in the papers about things you should eat or not, some same one thing and some another

[Jsports]

Where you get essential amino acids not found in most foods. You eat 5 various portions of fruit and veg and you get protein from multiple sources not just one. For instance eating number but bananas doesn't class as 5 a day because your not covering all vitamins.

Reduce sat fat/trans fats and sodium intakes, caffeine anything high gi which will spike your insulin levels and cause you to crash an hour later. Drink 2 litres of water or close to it. Don't eat high processed food or high in additives and there is no true evidence at aspartame actually does you damage so up to you if you have it. Eating it may cause cancer...yeah so can walking outside near traffic, you make your own mind up with the evidence you have. Try to include anti-oxidants which helps to balance out harmful oxidants in the body which there is evidence for. Be carful how much fish you eat as although it contains lots of really good stuff, it also contains mercury which taken in larger doses does serious damage just google mercury poisoning.

As with anything , anything can be harmful if you eat lots of it....so key, eat varied food based on the good things above and you should feel better overall in your health. Iv done this while having multivitamins and lean whey protein and the last 2 weeks iv felt energetic just like I was when I left school

[Penel]

Eat a wide variety of the best quality you can afford, and don't overdo the carbohydrates. There is no need to avoid saturated fats as they are essential to health and far better for you than the stuff in plastic containers.

Have a read of Michael Mosely's article on food.

dailymail.co.uk/femail/arti...

If you want to understand how food affects our bodies, have a read of Dr Robert Lustig who is an American obesity expert. There are articles on the net, and he has written a book called "Fat Chance" which gets a bit technical but explains it all very well.

[Jsports in reply to Penel]

nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pa...

Read this r.e sat fat, cholesterol increase vldl which deposits the fat into your walls of your artieries increase risk of angina, cardiac arrest, stroke, heart attack, chd, cvd, hypertension, diabetes, athlerosclerosis basically reduce what your eating don't increase it, unless ofc you wish to visit a hospital later in life.

You can't escape sat fats but the little we get in our diets is fine for functioning and excess just causes real damage avoid. If you wish to know in details forget daily mail and even some authors go and find the research done at top journals rather than someone's opinion on the findings...not all experts are correct

Your right though, don't believe everything you read in the papers if it's too good to be true then it probably is

[Penel in reply to Jsports]

Hi Jsport

Yes, it's a good idea to do as much research as possible, and there's a lot of information out there!

There is a big debate on the causes of CVD. There is research which indicates that refined carbohydrates may be the cause rather than sat fat, but the biochemistry is complicated. Personally, I'm sticking to full fat foods.

The article from the cardiologist makes a very interesting read (but it is an 'opinion' piece).

bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340

scientificamerican.com/arti...

ajcn.nutrition.org/content/...

[returner]

Hi Tanglewood,

There's quite a bit of good and free advice on the NHS Live Well webpages as jsports has pointed you to.

Literally a healthy balanced diet is one that contains the full range of nutrients needed by your body to function optimally. Those on weight loss programmes can tend to focus too much on just calories and cutting their input of sugars and fats especially. That is fine insofar as it goes, but overdoing it can cause people to stop taking in adequate amounts of essential nutrients. That in itself is rarely a problem in the shorter term, but can become a problem over weeks/months.

I would suggest that the best way of ensuring you take in all the vitamins, minerals, phyto-chemicals, anti-oxidants, and all the many other things that your body needs -(ironically probably more so when you are weight-reducing) - is to eat a good variety of foods, avoid the higher calorie ones, especially avoid the ones that are virtually all calories and no other nutrition, include fruit and veg (fresh if you can afford it) for the vitamins and mineral without too many calories, and I would personally suggest eat more fish.

A lot of it is really about swapping poor food choices for better ones, e.g. ditch the KitKat and have a few grapes instead, or ditch dunking the biscuits with your tea and have an apple or a banana after your tea. Even simple things like ditching the sugar in your tea or changing to skimmed milk can cause space in your daily calorie allowance which you can fill up with foods that contain better nutrition.