Balancing the diet
Doctors and nutrition experts tell you to eat a ‘balanced’ diet, but this does not mean eating the same amount of each type of food. You need to eat more of some foods than others to meet your body’s needs.
For a balanced diet, the variety of foods you eat should work in harmony with one another. Over the years, nutrition experts have drawn charts and plotted graphs to help people visualise which foods should be eaten in larger, or smaller, quantities. As more has been learned about nutrition, the diagrams have changed accordingly. Once food groups were shown as sections in a pie-chart; today, the pyramid is a popular, more representative shape.
Children, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and sick or elderly people may require foods in different proportions, but for most people the following guidelines are appropriate for a well-balanced diet.
The highest number of servings should come from complex-carbohydrate foods, the wholemeal varieties of bread, cereals, and pasta, brown rice and jacket potatoes. Bear in mind, however, that these foods are better for you if they are eaten with very little or no butter or rich sauces because these add many calories but few nutrients.
A large number of food portions should consist of vegetables, eaten either raw or lightly cooked. After that, try to eat almost as many portions of fruits. This will provide a wide array of vitamins and minerals.
Meat and dairy products, such as cheese and yoghurt, are important sources of proteins. They are often high in fat, however, so you should limit your intake of these foods to one or two small servings each day.
The higher the fat content of foods, the less you need of them. Fats appear at the top of the food pyramid as
a way of demonstrating how little you should eat each day in comparison with other types of foods. Products high in refined sugars also appear at the top, indicating that they are desirable only as a very small part of your diet.
