The Role of Diet

Diet plays a very important role in everyone's lives. Not only will diet affect your energy levels and body shape, but it will also affect your mood and overall health.

Whether you are a regular exerciser, or someone who interested in maintaining a basic level of health, it is important to be conscious of the types and quantities of food you put into your body. Each of the macro and micro-nutrients described in the Nutrient Roles section play a very important role within the human body and deficiencies in any of these nutrients can affect the body's function. In addition, the section on Balancing Calories provides strategies for assessing your daily calorie intake and expenditure.

This section of the website aims to provide practical healthy eating advice, assisiting you in maintaining a good balance of all of the nutrients required by the human body, along with appropriate methods for balancing your body's calorific requirements.

Healthy Eating

Healthy eating is a fairly broad term. It refers to a diet which is adequately balanced in both nutrients and calories, where there are little or no nutritional deficiencies and the intake of harmful food products is minimised. The majority of harmful food products come from processed foods, which are generally high in saturated, hydrogenated and trans fats and also contain high quantities or salt, sugar and preservatives (there are exceptions to this statement).

One of the most effective ways to minimise the intake of harmful food products is therefore to reduce or remove the intake of processed foods from a diet and to replace them with whole foods. Whole foods refer to foods in their most natural form (i.e. fresh meat, potatoes, rice, fruit and vegetables). This is something anyone can do in order to make an instant impact on the quality of their diet.

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