What is a balanced diet?

OK, so here is an interesting question for you.

What constitutes a balanced diet?

I have  to admit I was slightly taken aback by this question.  You see, I grew up around the kitchen and food.  During my childhood if we wanted sweets or lollies, we made them from ingredients.  If we wanted softdrinks/soda’s we made or brewed them. We only ever had ingredients in the house.  Getting takeaway food was not a concept that even existed for our family.  I first heard the concept as an adult.  So for me the idea of a balanced diet is very intuitive.  The idea that someone may not know almost seems, well, silly.

But as I started to talk to others, it became clearer.  Some/many people do not have that sort of childhood. So here is the start of an attempt to address that.

Over the next several days I will start a series of posts about what is a balanced diet and how we can achieve one!

Food, ingredients, if you like comes in several major groups.  There are Animal products, Fruits, Vegetables, Grains and Pulses, Herbs and spices.

Pretty much everything that you should put in your mouth comes from one of those groups.  As we have become busier and more focused in our societies we have started to let others do our food preparation for us.  This has meant that restaurants and corporations buy, prepare and cook our foods.  Examples of this are Hungry Jacks, Weightwatchers and local restaurants and take-aways.  Even the cafeteria at work, if you have one.

Unfortunately, there are some very negative issues around having other people prepare your food for you.

  1. As businesses, their focus is on making money. That means that their focus is on preparing the meal for the least possible cost and charging you as much as possible for it.  This has lead to the development of flavour and texture enhancing.
  2. There are storage issues.  This has lead to the development of preservative techniques and chemicals.  Some of these can lead to negative health outcomes for us.
  3. Handling and shipping.  This can cause damage to the food.  In many cases this has led to the development of fruits and vegetables simply because they are able to survive shipping and handling well.  Many of the fruits you will find in the local shops are only grown because of this issue.  Less appearance of bruising means less waste, so we grow apples, pears, etc that do not bruise easily.
  4. Colour.  Many of the bright and vivid colours that we see in fruit and vegetables, even meat, fade as they are cooked or stored.  This has led to the practice of colouring foods and of breeding plants that have colour fade resistance.
  5. Taste and texture.  While some foods, like a good curry or soup, has a developing flavour over several hours after they are cooked, many become tasteless and inedible.  This has led to the development of emulsifiers and other texture and taste enhancers.

As you start to see that there are many issues around food.  Many of them are not in our best interests, in terms of health and wellbeing.

Many businesses spend large amounts of money managing these issues to attempt to bring you healthy and nutritious food.

Unfortunately, in the end they are businesses and profit margins mean that in a competition between your health and the businesses survival in economic times like now, your health will be he loser.

March 30, 2009 · admin · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Nutrition

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