A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthful diet provides the body with essential Human nutrition: water, such as protein, such as , and adequate dietary fibre and food energy.
A healthy diet may contain fruits, vegetables, and , and may include little to no ultra-processed foods or sweetened beverages. The requirements for a healthy diet can be met from a variety of plant-based diet and animal-based foods, although additional sources of vitamin B12 are needed for those following a vegan diet. Various nutrition guides are published by medical and governmental institutions to educate individuals on what they should be eating to be healthy. Advertising may drive preferences towards unhealthy foods. To reverse this trend, consumers should be informed, motivated and empowered to choose healthy diets. Nutrition facts labels are also mandatory in some countries to allow consumers to choose between foods based on the components relevant to health.
It is estimated that in 2023 40% of the world population could not afford a healthy diet. The Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization have formulated four core principles of what constitutes healthy diets. According to these two organizations, health diets are:
The WHO has stated that insufficient vegetables and fruit is the cause of 2.8% of deaths worldwide.
Other WHO recommendations include:
The guidelines emphasize both health and environmental sustainability and a flexible approach. The committee that drafted it wrote: "The major findings regarding sustainable diets were that a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet. This pattern of eating can be achieved through a variety of dietary patterns, including the "Healthy U.S.-style Pattern", the "Healthy Vegetarian Pattern" and the "Healthy Mediterranean-style Pattern". Food group amounts are per day, unless noted per week.
+The three healthy patterns | |||
(cup eq) | 2 | 2 | 2.5 |
Vegetables (cup eq) | 2.5 | 2.5 | 2.5 |
Dark green | 1.5/wk | 1.5/wk | 1.5/wk |
Red/orange | 5.5/wk | 5.5/wk | 5.5/wk |
Starchy | 5/wk | 5/wk | 5/wk |
Legumes | 1.5/wk | 3/wk | 1.5/wk |
Others | 4/wk | 4/wk | 4/wk |
Grains (oz eq) | 6 | 6.5 | 6 |
Whole | 3 | 3.5 | 3 |
Refined | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Dairy product (cup eq) | 3 | 3 | 2 |
Protein Foods (oz eq) | 5.5 | 3.5 | 6.5 |
Meat (red and processed) | 12.5/wk | – | 12.5/wk |
Poultry | 10.5/wk | – | 10.5/wk |
Seafood | 8/wk | – | 15/wk |
Eggs | 3/wk | 3/wk | 3/wk |
Nuts/seeds | 4/wk | 7/wk | 4/wk |
Processed Soy (including tofu) | 0.5/wk | 8/wk | 0.5/wk |
Vegetable oil (grams) | 27 | 27 | 27 |
Saturated fat limit (grams) | 18 | 21 | 17 |
limit (grams) | 30 | 36 | 29 |
It is recommended that children consume 25 grams or less of added sugar (100 calories) per day. Other recommendations include no extra sugars in those under two years old and less than one soft drink per week. As of 2017, decreasing total fat is no longer recommended, but instead, the recommendation to lower risk of cardiovascular disease is to increase consumption of monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats, while decreasing consumption of .
Other than nutrition, the guide recommends staying active and maintaining a healthy body weight.
Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.
Marion Nestle expresses the mainstream view among scientists who study nutrition:
In 2022, the American Society for Preventive Cardiology defined a healthful dietary pattern as a diet consisting predominantly of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, plant protein and fatty fish with reduced consumption of saturated fat, salt and ultra-processed food. The National Heart Foundation of Australia's "Healthy Eating Principles" include plenty of fruit, vegetables and whole grains with a variety of protein sources such as fish and seafood, lean poultry with a restriction on red meat.
The DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) is a diet promoted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (part of the NIH, a United States government organization) to control hypertension. A major feature of the plan is limiting intake of sodium, and the diet also generally encourages the consumption of nuts, whole grains, fish, poultry, fruits, and vegetables while lowering the consumption of red meats, sweets, and sugar. It is also "rich in potassium, magnesium, and calcium, as well as protein".
The Mediterranean diet, which includes limiting consumption of red meat and using olive oil in cooking, has also been shown to improve cardiovascular outcomes.
Scientific research is also investigating impacts of nutrition on health- and lifespans beyond any specific range of diseases.
Moreover, not only do the components of diets matter but the total caloric content and eating patterns may also impact health – dietary restriction such as caloric restriction is considered to be potentially healthy to include in eating patterns in various ways in terms of health- and lifespan.
Globally, such diets are estimated to cause about 19% of gastrointestinal cancer, 31% of ischaemic heart disease, and 11% of strokes, thus making it one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide, and the 4th leading risk factor for disease burden. As an example, the Western pattern diet is "rich in red meat, dairy products, processed and artificially sweetened foods, and salt, with minimal intake of fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, and whole grains," contrasted by the Mediterranean diet which is associated with less morbidity and mortality rate.
Dietary patterns that lead to non-communicable diseases generate productivity losses. A true cost accounting (TCA) assessment on the hidden impacts of agrifood systems estimated that unhealthy dietary patterns generate more than USD 9 trillion in health-related hidden costs in 2020, which is 73 percent of the total quantified hidden costs of global agrifood systems (USD 12.7 trillion). Globally, the average productivity losses per person from dietary intake is equivalent to 7 percent of GDP purchasing power parity (PPP) in 2020; low-income countries report the lowest value (4 percent), while other income categories report 7 percent or higher.
are criticized for being avenues of entry into schools for junk food promoters, but there is little in the way of regulation and it is difficult for most people to properly analyze the real merits of a company referring to itself as "healthy." The Committee of Advertising Practice in the United Kingdom launched a proposal to limit media advertising for food and soft drink products high in fat, salt, or sugar. The British Heart Foundation released its own government-funded advertisements, labeled "Food4Thought", which were targeted at children and adults to discourage unhealthy habits of consuming junk food.
From a psychology and culture perspective, a healthier diet may be difficult to achieve for people with poor eating habits. "Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries" article by Kim Severson in The New York Times 24 September 2010, accessed 25 September 2010 This may be due to tastes acquired in childhood and preferences for sugary, salty, and fatty foods. In 2018, the UK chief medical officer recommended that sugar and salt be taxed to discourage consumption. The UK government 2020 Obesity Strategy encourages healthier choices by restricting point-of-sale promotions of less-healthy foods and drinks.
The effectiveness of population-level health interventions has included food pricing strategies, mass media campaigns and worksite wellness programs. One peso per liter of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) price intervention implemented in Mexico produced a 12% reduction in SSB purchasing. Mass media campaigns in Pakistan and the USA aimed at increasing vegetable and fruit consumption found positive changes in dietary behavior. Reviews of the effectiveness of worksite wellness interventions found evidence linking the programs to weight loss and increased fruit and vegetable consumption.
Harvard School of Public Health
Others
The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches.
The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on . Follow these precepts and you will go a long way toward preventing the major diseases of our overfed society—coronary heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of others.... These precepts constitute the bottom line of what seem to be the far more complicated dietary recommendations of many health organizations and national and international governments—the forty-one "key recommendations" of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, for example. ... Although you may feel as though advice about nutrition is constantly changing, the basic ideas behind my four precepts have not changed in half a century. And they leave plenty of room for enjoying the pleasures of food.
Historically, a healthy diet was defined as a diet comprising more than 55% of carbohydrates, less than 30% of fat and about 15% of proteins. This view is currently shifting towards a more comprehensive framing of dietary needs as a global need of various nutrients with complex interactions, instead of per nutrient type needs.
Specific conditions
Diabetes
Hypertension
Obesity
Gluten-related disorders
Epilepsy
Research
low consumption of salt and foods of animal origin, and increased intake of plant-based foods—whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts—are linked with reduced atherosclerosis risk. The same applies for the replacement of butter and other animal/tropical fats with olive oil and other unsaturated-fat-rich oil. ... With regard to meat, new evidence differentiates processed and red meat—both associated with increased CVD risk—from poultry, showing a neutral relationship with CVD for moderate intakes. ... New data endorse the replacement of most high glycemic index (GI) foods with both whole grain and low GI cereal foods.
Affordability
Unhealthy diets
Fad diet
Public health
Other animals
See also
Sources
External links
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