Healthy Eating: The Complete Guide For Real Life
Healthy nutrition is a way of eating that ensures proper growth and development of the body, maintaining health and maintaining an optimal physical and mental state. The main idea of a healthy diet is to provide your body with all the necessary nutrients, vitamins, minerals and other useful substances, without exaggerating with calories or harmful ingredients.
To eat healthier, it is enough to start with small changes. Make every meal or snack consist of nutrient-dense foods and try to avoid processed foods.
Depending on who you ask, "healthy eating" can take many forms. It seems that everyone, including health professionals, government health officials, co-workers, and family members, has an opinion about the healthiest way to eat.
Also, the nutrition articles we read on Google or on social media can be simply confusing with their contradictory—and often unfounded—suggestions and rules.
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It's definitely not conducive to clarity if you just want to eat healthy.
The truth is that eating healthy doesn't have to be complicated. It is possible to fuel your body while enjoying the foods you love.
After all, food is meant to be enjoyed, not feared, counted, weighed, and constantly monitored.
This article demystifies the hype around what healthy eating means and how to make it work for you.
Content
- Why does healthy eating matter?
- Do you need to follow a certain diet to eat healthy?
- Basics of healthy nutrition
- Highly processed food
- Should I cut back on certain foods and beverages for optimal health?
- How can you make healthy eating work for you?
- Developing a healthy relationship with food can take time
- Tips for healthy eating in the real world
Why does healthy eating matter?
Bare Thought
A healthy diet is important for many reasons, including fueling the body, obtaining essential nutrients, reducing the risk of disease, increasing life expectancy, and promoting optimal mental and physical well-being.
Before we dive into what healthy eating means, it's important to explain why it's important.
First, food is what nourishes you and delivers the calories and nutrients your body needs to function. If your diet is lacking in calories or one or more nutrients, your health can suffer.
Likewise, if you consume too many calories, you may experience weight gain. Obese people have a significantly increased risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, and heart, liver, and kidney disease.
In addition, the quality of your diet affects your disease risks, life expectancy, and mental health.
While diets rich in ultra-processed foods are associated with increased mortality and a greater risk of conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, diets consisting mostly of nutrient-dense whole foods are associated with longer life spans and disease protection (Source: Pub Med Research).
Diets rich in highly processed foods may also increase the risk of depressive symptoms, especially among people who exercise less (Source: Front Nutr Research).
What's more, if your current diet is high in ultra-processed foods and drinks like fast food, soda, and sugary cereal, but low in whole foods like vegetables, nuts, and fish, you're likely not get enough of certain nutrients. This, in turn, can negatively affect your overall health
Do you need to follow a certain diet to eat healthy?
The main idea
Healthy eating does not involve any specific diet. Rather, it means prioritizing your health by fueling your body with nutrient-dense foods.
While some people need (or choose) to avoid certain foods or follow a diet for health reasons, most people don't need to follow a specific diet to feel their best.
That doesn't mean certain eating patterns can't benefit you.
For example, some people feel healthier on a low-carb diet, while others thrive on a high-carb diet.
But in general, healthy eating has nothing to do with following diets or certain dietary rules. "Eating healthy" simply means prioritizing your well-being by fueling your body with nutritious foods.
The specifics may be different for each person depending on their location, financial situation, culture and society, and taste preferences.
Basics of healthy nutrition
Now that you know why a healthy diet is important, let's go over some nutrition basics.
Nutritional value
When you think about healthy eating, your first thought might be calories. While calories are important, your primary concern should be nutrients.
That's because nutrients, including proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals, are what your body needs to thrive. "Nutrient density" refers to the amount of nutrients in a food per calorie it provides.
All foods contain calories, but not all foods are rich in nutrients.
For example, a bar or a cheeseburger from McDonald's can be incredibly high in calories, but they lack vitamins, minerals, proteins and fiber. Similarly, foods marketed as "diet" or "low calorie" may be very low in calories but have no nutrients.
For example, egg whites contain far fewer calories and fat than whole eggs. However, egg white provides 1% or less of the daily value (DV) of iron, phosphorus, zinc, choline, and vitamins A and B12, while a whole egg contains 5–21% of the daily value (DV) of these nutrients (Source: FNDDS Research).
The source of nutrients is the yolk with a high fat content.
Also, while some nutrient-dense foods, such as many fruits and vegetables, are low in calories, many, such as nuts, full-fat yogurt, egg yolks, avocados, and fatty fish, are high in calories. This is completely normal!
Just because a food is high in calories doesn't mean it's bad for you. On the other hand, just because a food is low in calories doesn't mean it's a healthy choice.
If your food choices are based solely on calories, you're missing the point of healthy eating.
As a general rule, try to eat mostly foods that are high in nutrients, such as protein, fiber, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals. These foods include vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, fatty fish, and eggs.
Variety of diet
Another component of a healthy diet is the variety of the diet, that is, the use of a variety of products.
Eating a diet that's rich in a variety of foods supports gut bacteria, promotes a healthy body weight, and protects against chronic disease (Source: University of Cambridge Research).
However, eating a variety of foods can be difficult if you are a picky eater.
If this is the case, try introducing the new foods one at a time. If you don't eat a lot of vegetables, start by adding your favorite vegetables to one or two meals a day and build up.
Although you may not like trying new foods, research shows that the more you are exposed to a food, the more likely you are to become accustomed to it.
Ratio of macroelements
Macronutrients - The main nutrients you get from food are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins (fiber is considered a type of carbohydrate).
As a general rule, your meals and snacks should be balanced between these three indicators. In particular, adding protein and fat to fiber-rich carbohydrate sources makes meals more filling and tasty.
For example, if you have a piece of fruit for a snack, adding a spoonful of nut butter or some cheese will help satiate the body more than if you eat the fruit alone.
However, it's okay if your diet isn't always balanced.
Most people do not need to count macronutrients and follow a prescribed macronutrient plan, except for athletes, people seeking a specific body composition, and those who need to gain muscle or fat for medical reasons.
Also, counting macronutrients and obsessively wanting to stay within a certain range can lead to an unhealthy fixation on food and calories or cause disordered eating tendencies.
It's important to note that some people can thrive on low-carb, high-fat, high-protein diets—or low-fat, high-carb diets. However, even on these diets, counting macronutrients is usually not necessary.
For example, if you feel best on a low-carb diet, simply choosing low-carb foods like non-starchy vegetables, proteins, and fats over high-carb foods will usually be enough.
Highly processed food
The main idea
Include a variety of nutrient-dense whole foods in your diet, limiting highly processed foods.
One of the best ways to improve your diet is to reduce your intake of ultra-processed foods.
You don't have to completely avoid processed foods. In fact, many healthy foods, such as shelled nuts, canned beans, and frozen fruits and vegetables, have been processed in one way or another.
But highly processed foods such as soda, mass-produced baked goods, candy, sugary cereal, and certain boxed snacks contain small amounts of whole food ingredients.
These products typically contain ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and artificial sweeteners (Source: PubMed Central Research).
Studies have linked diets high in ultra-processed foods to a higher risk of depression, heart disease, obesity and many other complications (Source: BMC Med Research).
On the other hand, diets low in these foods and high in whole, nutrient-dense foods have the opposite effect, protecting against disease, extending lifespan, and promoting overall physical and mental well-being.
Therefore, it is best to give preference to foods rich in nutrients, especially vegetables and fruits.
