If you want to improve your nutrition, there are three things you need to know, to live a longer and healthier life. They are a balanced diet, the nutritional value of your food and the exercise you do.I will explain each of them in this article, and show how you can use them to achieve your own nutritional goals.Why Is Nutrition Important in a Balanced Diet?
Obtaining a balanced diet is only worthwhile if you make sure that the food you eat has real nutritional value and you do sufficient exercise to complete the circle.A balanced diet requires eating a good variety of whole foods – fruit, vegetables, grains and protein sources such as beef, chicken and fish.Our bodies are about 70% water and need a regular supply of water to maintain the optimum level. We can live without food for some time, but not water.Why Is Nutritional Value Important?
Increasing the nutritional value of your food requires avoiding highly processed foods and reading of food labels to ensure that the food contains what we expect and does not contain hidden sugars, saturated fats and sodium.
Much of the food available to us is so processed that it retains very little of the original nutrients. We need to search for food that retains its nutritional value to us and eat a much higher percentage of this type of food.
In general, we should avoid drinks with additives, such as sugar and flavouring or keep them to a minimum. Soft drinks will provide the liquid we need, but have limited nutritional value, so are best avoided.Why Is Nutrition Important for Exercise?
Exercise should be considered as a very important part of a nutrition triangle which include the food we eat and the water we drink. Sufficient exercise is vital to our well being.Exercise consumes calories that we need to replenish, or use to remove fat stored in the body. High levels of exercise require an equivalent level of nutrition to maintain a healthy balance.The quantity of water we require will increase with the level of exercise, and our calorie consumption also increases with our exercise level.We gain energy from the food we eat, so it is important to eat sufficient food with good nutritional value. A balanced diet results when we eat a very good variety of food.If we wish to lose weight, we can use exercise to burn up excess calories and monitor our nutritional intake to maintain or improve our health.We need to balance the level of our exercise with our nutritional and water intakes.