If you're curious about nutrition and diet, you're probably wondering what healthy dietary choices you can make to ensure you're getting the proper nutrition. Healthy and smart dietary choices are good for you, and are good for others, too: others in your family, and others with whom you share your neighborhood and world. If they're really smart choices, they'll be good for your pocketbook too.
Diet
According to food expert, Michael Pollan, a smart diet doesn't have to be complex. To keep it simple, Pollan encourages you to seek out real foods for your diet: that is, foods your great-grandmother would have recognized as food, thus eliminating "non-foods" such as neon-colored cereals, packages of gummy animals, or soup mixes flavored with bits of shrunken Franken-broccoli. His summary advice of how to eat well and be well: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Nutrition
According to Pollan, we've been convinced by nutritionists and by big corporations that we eat food to get nutrients. It is true that our different body systems need us to take in all the nutrients so that we can think clearly and be active and healthy people. The University of Massachusetts lists vitamins A, B, and C, calcium, carbohydrates, cholesterol, fat, fiber, folic acid, additional incomplete proteins, iron, niacin, protein, riboflavin, saturated and unsaturated fats, sodium and thiamin as the main nutrients in foods.
Western Diet: Bad for Us
According to Pollan, Americans focused on nutrition changes that need to be made are missing the point. He observes that Westerners tend to obsess about nutrition and getting the right ratio of carbohydrates to protien to fat, yet continue to eat lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, and few vegetables and whole grains. He points out, "What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets." This illustrates the importance of changing our diets. Pollan reminds us that four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.
Nutrition, Diet and Your Family
Eliminating junk food from your kids' diets will teach them smart habits early that contribute to their overall wellness and nutrition. As of 2010, according to a report on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, American kids were reportedly getting 40 percent of their daily calories from junk food and 20 percent from just six foods, including ice cream and pizza. This information -- together with other evidence showing how dangerous a lack of nutrition in diets can be over a lifetime -- should tell you that switching out pizza for sandwiches, or ice cream for sorbet, isn't going to do enough to help your kids build a healthy foundation for the foods they take in throughout life. Rather, children need a better understanding of what nutrients comprise a healthy diet overall so they can make healthy choices.
Fad Diets: Not Often Successful or Nutritious
The Harvard School of Public Health also reports that though they may work in the short term, strange or extreme diets are bound to eventually fail. In addition, these diets deprive you of the healthy range of foods you need to get all the nutrients. To lose weight, you can eat almost anything you want in moderation, as long as the basis of your diet is a healthy mix of different species of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, especially leafy veggies as noted by Pollan.
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