What is a balanced diet?
Generally, when the food contains adequate nutritional element according to the body’s need, it is known as balanced diet. Balanced diet provides all the essential elements of the food, such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, water, and calories to the body. Everyday nutritional needs get fulfilled by taking various types of food in sufficient quantities. In order to ensure ourselves healthy every day, we need to take all the six types of nutritional elements as required.
Importance of balanced diet
1. Importance of balanced diet, healthy food is needed to supply all the nutritional elements in sufficient quantities according to needs of our body. Balanced diet prevents diseases and infections.
2. Balanced diet is important for the proper growth of the body, without it growth will be hampered. So it is vital for ensuring proper supply of sufficient food-energy for meeting the requirement of the body.
3. Malnutrition can be prevented with balanced diet. Body gains weight if food is taken more than necessity, on the other hand body loses weight if less food is taken, immunity power will be decreased without it. So healthy diet is mandatory to keep in good health.
4. Balanced diet makes body active, so attentiveness will increase and energy will high. As a result, productivity increases.
5. For better skin, beautiful hair and sharp eyesight, proper nutritional diet is essential. Overall, balanced diet makes body healthy and younger.
A guide to balanced diet : Food pyramid
The food pyramid shows the meals we need to take daily in five groups. Generally, the food pyramid provides an idea of the food along with its type and quantity to be taken in order to make it a balanced diet. It is a kind of guideline which denotes, through pictures, the type and quantity of food to be taken. From the bottom, these steps are:
First step – Water: Water is much essential for survival. Every day, we need to drink 6-8 glasses of water.
Second step – Grain foods are rice, bread, noodles, fried rice, etc. from this type of food we get energy.
Third step – from foods and vegetables, we get different types of vitamin and minerals.
Fourth step – Meat, fish, egg, milk cheese, etc. are included in this food group. Other than protein, different vitamins and minerals are also available in these foods.
Fifth step – In this step there are oil, fat type food, sweet type food. From this type of Food we can get sufficient energy. So it is required to take this type of food in small quantity otherwise body will become overweight.
To get the essential nutritional elements and balanced diet, we have to take food from the different steps of food pyramid according to daily requirement of the body.
It can be concluded that, for maintaining good health, we should follow the food pyramid chart.
