NUTRITION HEALTH part II

 NUTRITION HEALTH 

How to (really) eat healthy 10 minutes of reading Nowadays, access to dietary knowledge is very easy.

 Everyone on the internet is a nutritionist and can give you the "best" advice. But it comes with information chaos and potential misinformation. Which diet is the best? How to eat healthy? And what is healthy eating really?

 From everywhere we are attacked by diet proposals and advertisements for supplements. But healthy eating is not a miracle diet. 

It's a lifestyle! 

It is enough to follow a few simple rules every day to really eat healthy. How to do it? 

Here is a simple guide for beginners. How to eat healthy: 5 simple rules

 Avoid highly processed foods The basic and easiest rule of healthy eating is to avoid ready-made food from the store. 

This does not mean that if you want to be healthy, you can never reach for chocolate-covered wafers or meatballs in sauce from a jar, but such products should be a rarity in your kitchen. It is worth following the 80/20 rule here. 80% of the diet consists of food prepared by you from the beginning - e.g. coleslaw and carrot salad instead of ready-made coleslaw (with added preservatives and flavor enhancers), home-baked chicken legs instead of ready-made breaded pieces of meat, cardboard tomato sauce instead ready-made spaghetti sauce. On the other hand, 20% of products can be ready-to-eat products, where the only effort you have to make is to open the package and possibly heat it up. 

There are many categories of products that are processed, but not highly processed. They also vary greatly in quality. For example, sausage may consist only of meat, salt and spices.

 Or its composition may also look like this: 

turkey meat (74%), water, salt, acidity regulators (potassium lactate, potassium acetates), soy protein, stabilizers (diphosphates, triphosphates, polyphosphates), thickener (carrageenan), wheat fiber , flavor enhancer (monosodium glutamate), flavors, antioxidants (sodium isoascorbate, sodium ascorbate), spice extracts, modified starch, glucose, preservative (sodium nitrite). The choice should be obvious - the shorter the composition, the better.

Not everyone has to be a nutritionist, but it is good to be aware that a short composition of products is very often a good composition. The most common advice is not to buy foods that have more than 5 items on the ingredient list. It's not that hard nowadays. More and more manufacturers focus on quality, release natural lines of their products. You can easily find yoghurt without added sugar or sausages with 99% meat in stores. How to eat healthy? 

Read the  labels when shopping!

 Eat vegetables and fruits at every meal The new pyramid of healthy eating developed by the Institute of Food and Nutrition vividly explains how to eat healthily. She recommends vegetables and fruits as the basis of her daily diet. They should make up at least half of what you eat in a day. Remember, however, that vegetables and fruits do not have the same importance in the diet. In the daily portion of these fresh products, vegetables should constitute 75% and fruit 25%.

 For example, for half a pepper, tomato and 2 handfuls of lettuce, there is 1 apple. Not all vegetables and fruits must be eaten raw during the day, but it is the raw ones that provide the most health-promoting substances - antioxidants and vitamins. Vegetables play a huge role in the daily diet and help protect health against such common diseases as cancer or atherosclerosis.

Avoid sugar Sugar is added to almost everything. It is found, of course, in sweets, but also in products that have little in common with sweet taste, e.g. ketchups. 

Sugar is deadly for the body - its excessive consumption is not only associated with a tendency to overweight and problems with tooth decay, but also has a negative impact on health. As reported in a 2016 publication by the journal Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences and many other epidemiological studies, excessive sugar consumption:

is a direct cause of problems with overweight and obesity, especially abdominal obesity, causes insulin resistance (a physiological state in which body cells become less and less sensitive to insulin, and the pancreas produces more and more of it to metabolize sugar from food as efficiently), leads to type II diabetes, causes chronic low-grade inflammation, leads to metabolic syndrome (a disease state with fatty internal organs, elevated levels of triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure),is one of the causes of atherosclerosis, responsible for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, intensifies acne because it stimulates the production of androgens, the work of sebaceous glands and inflammation, may increase the risk of depression it's addictive. 

Drink water, avoid sugary drinks Water is essential for human life. All life processes take place in the aquatic environment, and even slight dehydration causes problems with concentration. Remember that the appearance of the feeling of thirst means that the body is already experiencing water shortages. Therefore, you need to drink it in small portions throughout the day and it is best not to allow thirst to appear. 

How much water do you need to drink during the day?

 Common recommendations are 2 liters a day. However, the amount of water consumed should be adjusted to the physical activity and body weight. For 1 kg of body weight, you should drink 30 ml of water if you do not exercise. A great way to gauge your body's hydration is to observe the color of your urine. It should be at most light yellow. If your urine is orange, you are definitely not drinking enough.

 Avoid sweetened drinks and drink fruit juices occasionally. They also hydrate, but they provide large amounts of simple sugars and liquid calories that the brain does not treat as food. And as you know from the point above, sugar in the diet must be very limited.

Follow the list of recommended and contraindicated foods

 How to start eating healthy? 

Most of the foods you buy should come from this list: 

vegetables, fruit, fresh fish, fresh meat, legume seeds, nuts and seeds, eggs,dairy without added sugar, groats, rice, wholemeal bread, sourdough bread, cereal flakes.

 Avoid these foods to ensure you eat healthy:

 shop sweets, chips and other salty snacks, ready meals, sweetened dairy, meat products with a long composition, carbonated and non-carbonated sweetened drinks, sweetened breakfast cereals.

More info & Sample meals idea tomorrow;) stay tuned 

                              - Coach Alina -