Balanced diet

Your diet must provide you with sufficient energy for good health.

To be healthy you need a right balance of different foods as they have got a different effect on your body.

You need:

• carbohydrates to release energy
• fat to release energy and keep warm
• protein for cell replacement, cell repair and growth
• vitamins and minerals so your body is functioning well and is healthy (e.g. keeps your skin look healthy)
• fibre to make sure everything is going alright in your digestive system.

Your metabolism is the energy needed for chemical reactions in your body to take place. The speed at which they happen is your metabolic rate.

Different people have different metabolic rates but there are ways to boost your metabolic rate. For example, exercising.

When you exercise you need more energy so all reactions must happen faster so your metabolic rate goes up. Exercise also builds muscle and muscle need more energy so therefore metabolic rate must be higher.

If your diet is out of balanced (like... really badly), you are MALNOURISHED. But there is a significant difference between MALNOURISHMENT and STARVATION. When you starve it means you don't get enough food of any sort.

As you all probably know, eating too much can lead to obesity. But there are even more health problems when eating too much:

• type 2 diabetes
• high blood pressure
• arthritis
• heart disease
• and sometimes you risk some types of cancer.

So... what causes obesity?
The first would be unbalanced diet (common sense really because this post is about diet), lack of exercise and sometimes inherited factors.
If you're eating too much carbohydrates and fat it is likely for you to become obese.

But don't put your forks and knives down yet. Eating too little can cause some problems as well. Probably most known is anorexia but it's not all about diet; it's in your mind.

Eating too little can cause:

• poor resistance (having a cold all year round... brrr...)
• small growth in children
• irregular periods in women

If you inherit an underactive thyroid gland it can lower your metabolic rate.
Other inherited factors can affect your cholesterol.

What is actually cholesterol? It is a fatty substance and it is essential for your good health.
BUT... if your cholesterol level is too high it can increase the chance of developing a heart disease. How? The cholesterol can block the arteries, so blood with oxygen can't reach the heart and if the muscle can't work, you get the heart attack because your heart can't beat properly.

Saturated fats = raised cholesterol level
Unsaturated fats = lower cholesterol level
HDL (high density lipoprotein) is a good cholesterol.

LDL (low density lipoprotein) is a bad cholesterol.