Healthy Eating Guide

A healthy eating guide is designed to guide you into making informed choices about the food you eat on a daily basis. This healthy eating guide will change the way you eat by giving you healthy eating tips and simple guidelines that are easy to follow so that you can eat healthily and enjoy a long and healthy life.

When you understand the basics, healthy eating will soon become an enjoyable new way of life.

There is no need for healthy eating recipes to be boring or monotonous because there are so many foods to choose from and with a little bit of creativity you can eat something different every day.

The most important aspect of healthy eating is to be aware of basic food values so that you do not unconsciously give your body worthless foods that it cannot use.

This healthy eating guide will help you understand which food you should be eating to stay healthy and which unhealthy foods you should avoid.

6 Healthy Eating Tips

• Fresh is best

• Processed and refined food should be avoided

• Sugar and all its derivatives should be cut down to a minimum, preferably cut out

• Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit, raw when possible

• Eat less fat

• Eat foods rich in fibre (formerly known as roughage)

Healthy Eating Tips 1: Fresh is Best

You should aim to eat as much wholesome, fresh, uncontaminated food as possible. It is the best way to get essential vitamins and minerals.

Most of the food available in stores and supermarkets has been tampered with in some way; the goodness taken out by refining and processing, chemicals added to prolong shelf life, stabilize, preserve, flavour, colour, sweeten, and thicken - all of which may please your eyes and your taste buds, but not your stomach or your health.

Healthy Eating Tips 2: Avoid Processed Food

Be wary of anything white - white flour, pastries, rice, and sugar. White means a blank, most of the nourishment has been taken out and all sorts of synthetic things put in. Wholegrain cereals, flour, bread and brown rice should replace this fortified white stodge.

Healthy Eating Tips 3: Cut Out Sugar

Sugar is the number one enemy of healthy eating and good nutrition yet sugar accounts for about 20% of an average diet in the Western world.

Sugar was unknown to man until 200 years ago, so the body handles it as a foreign substance.

In nature sugar is packaged with vitamins and minerals - in fruit as fructose and in vegetables as starch.

The refined product we call sugar is in fact straight sucrose, which your body absorbs much faster than natural sugars, and because it is so similar to blood sugar which has already been metabolised into glucose, it escapes your body’s processing action.

Your body is forced to use its vitamins and minerals and acids to fight the invasion, and this surge of activity can lower blood sugar and body energy levels leaving you feeling tired, mentally slow, irritable and susceptible to disease.

The odd sweet or chocolate bar gives an initial spurt due to the acceleration of your metabolism, but shortly afterwards you are more depleted then ever. Therefore substitute honey for sugar: brown sugar is next best.

Healthy Eating Tips 4: Eat Plenty of Vegetables and Fruit

Fruit and vegetables should make up the highest proportion of your healthy eating diet. They can supply all the necessary vitamins and minerals. Wash them thoroughly but not overmuch. Eat the skins whenever possible, they are often the richest part.

Healthy Eating Tips 5: Eat Less Fat

Evidence is conflicting on this issue but is seems reasonable to keep it to a minimum.

This means cutting a lot of fat off meat, restricting butter, using unsaturated fats and unrefined vegetable oils.

It does not necessarily mean skimmed milk and cottage cheese - that is a personal choice.

Healthy Eating Tips 6: Eat Foods Rich in Fibre

The missing ingredient in many diets is fibre. It was once called roughage and considered essential for healthy eating and the proper working of the bowels.

Overlooked over the last fifty years, it is now thought to be directly related to the high incidence of colon-rectal cancer, and also to the increased prevalence of diabetes, gallstones, appendicitis, varicose veins, haemorrhoids and obesity. Yet fibre passes virtually unchanged through our intestines and is excreted as waste matter.

Fibre is the structural part of a plant, the connective tissue that supports the cells - leaves, stems, seeds, flowers, fruits, bulbs, roots and tubers are all sources of fibre.

In itself it doesn’t contain nourishment, but it is believed that its bulk is needed to provide a smooth intestinal voyage for other nutrients.

What is known is that a high-fibre diet takes longer to consume and you are more likely to reach a point of satiation before you eat too much. Also it takes a lot of chewing, therefore more saliva and gastric juices are produced which aid in the digestion of other nutrients.

Again fruit and vegetables are the main suppliers of fibre, and best eaten raw with their skins, or lightly cooked.

Whole grains in cereals and flours are good for fibre and for other reasons; bran for instance, a very good source, can be taken in water, sprinkled on other foods or made into bread.

When working out healthy eating basics for a nutritious diet think in terms of vegetables, fruits, proteins, grains (the carbohydrates group) and fats in that order of importance.

Healthy Eating Guide: Important Food Groups

PROTEINS: Primarily for building and repairing body tissue and helping to counteract daily wear and tear. Essential to life, they satisfy hunger and have so many functions it would be impossible to list them all.

A few of the more important are:

• Ability to build hormones and enzymes which aid in energy production

• Digestion of food and excretion from the tissues and body

• The making of haemoglobin within the red corpuscles

• Maintaining the acid-alkaline balance of the body

• Assisting in clotting the blood

• Forming antibodies to fight infection and disease

Proteins are found in flesh foods (meat, poultry and fish), dairy products (eggs, milk and cheese are the best sources of all), soya beans and nuts, grains (especially wheatgerm) and some vegetables.

CARBOHYDRATES: Provide energy for physical and mental exertion by supplying immediate calories; they assist in the assimilation and digestion of other foods. A deficiency leads to low energy level, poor health and mental depression.

There are three forms of carbohydrates – sugars, starches and cellulose.

The sugar and starch are converted to glucose for energy; excess not spent as energy is quickly stored as fat. In an effort to burn up this excess, the body uses extra vitamin B, thus depriving other organs.

The cellulose carbohydrates (a large part of fruit and vegetables) have no energy value but provide the fibre necessary to regulate the bowels.

The best carbohydrates are found in vegetables, fruits, whole grain flours and cereals.

Acceptable sugar carbohydrates are honey, blackstrap molasses and dried raisins.

Unacceptable sugar and starch carbohydrates are refined sugars, flours, cereals and breads.

FATS: Provide a delayed source of energy and act as carriers for fat-soluble vitamins. Fats also make calcium available to body tissues, thus promoting growth. They prevent the skin from becoming dry.

It is important to have fatty deposits to protect the vital organs and a layer under the skin preserves heat and protects the body against cold. A deficiency of fats can lead to a deficiency of vitamins, and to skin disorders. Excess means obesity and indigestion.

There are two types: saturated fats which are hard at room temperature and come mostly from animal sources; and unsaturated fats, usually liquid and from vegetable sources. Years ago nutritionists maintained that it didn’t matter whether one had animal or vegetable fat, however it is now widely accepted that hard animal fats create high cholesterol content in the blood.

For this reason limit animal fats like butter and solid unsaturated fats such as margarine and be liberal with liquid unrefined vegetable oil - olive, corn, wheatgerm, and sunflower, sesame, avocado and peanut. They all contain linoleic acid which is particularly beneficial to your skin (do not use refined vegetable oils or hydrogenated oils).

There are no wonder foods regardless of what you may read but there are some foods that contain a particularly concentrated amount of vitamins and minerals. They include honey, brewers’ yeast, blackstrap molasses, wheatgerm, yoghurt (natural), and sunflower seeds.

Healthy Eating Guide: Cooking

A few basic rules are important for healthy eating: no frying in additional fat; meat, poultry and game can be cooked in its own fat or with a little oil (always unrefined vegetable oil, avoid butter) or roasted, braised, boiled or grilled.

When cooking vegetables use a minimum of water and cook for the minimum of time otherwise vitamins and minerals are destroyed.

Don’t add chemicals such as bicarbonate of soda, use a few drops of lemon juice instead.

Learn to bake with wholegrain flours and sugar substitutes.

Healthy Eating Guide: Selection and Servings

Constantly vary vegetables and fruits.

Balance the flesh and dairy products - eggs for breakfast, cheese for lunch, meat for dinner, for example. This is not a diet for weight loss but be sensible and keep to moderate portions.

Eat raw fibre food first, it fills you up.

An average meat serving should be about 20 grams and no bigger than the palm of your hand.

A vegetable serving should be about a cup, the same for rice and other grains. One large baked potato or three new boiled ones.

Salads and raw vegetables in any quantity but not too much fruit because of its high sugar content: one apple, orange or banana, a small bowl of berries, a slice of melon, half a grapefruit.

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Healthy Eating

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