A healthy diet is one that helps maintain or improve general health. It is important for lowering many chronic health risks, such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and cancer. A healthy diet involves consuming appropriate amounts of all essential nutrients and an adequate amount of water. Nutrients can be obtained from many different foods, so there are numerous diets that may be considered healthy. A healthy diet needs to have a balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, calories to support energy need and micro nutrients to meet the needs for human nutrition without inducing toxicity or excessive weight gain from consuming excessive amounts.The World Health Organization (WHO) makes the following 5 recommendations with respect to both populations and individuals:
- Eat roughly the same amount of calories that your body is using. A healthy weight is a balance between energy consumed and energy that is ‘burnt off’.
- Increase consumption of plant foods, particularly fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts.
- limit intake of fats, namely saturated fats and trans fats and replace with healthier unsaturated fats.
- Limit the intake of granulated sugar. A 2003 report recommends less than 10% simple sugars.
- Limit salt / sodium consumption from all sources and ensure that salt is iodized.
Other recommendations include:
- Sufficient essential amino acids to provide cellular replenishment and transport proteins. All essential amino acids are present together only in animals. Many plants such as quinoa, soy, and hemp also provide almost all the essential acids but are always lacking in one or more essential amino acid. Those who omit meat products from their diets may still easily obtain all the essential amino acid in their diets by consuming adequate amounts of plant products and grain products, which combine to provide complete proteins to the diet. Fruits such as avocado and pumpkin seeds also have almost all of the essential amino acids.
- Essential micronutrients such as vitamins and certain minerals.
- Avoiding directly poisonous (e.g. heavy metals) and carcinogenic (e.g. benzene) substances;
- Avoiding foods contaminated by human pathogens (e.g. E. coli, tapeworm eggs).