Basic Principles of Good Nutrition – Eating For Life
In our daily quest for success and happiness we tend to focus our attention on our careers, love lives, family and friends. Very seldom does something as mundane as our nutritional needs get any attention beyond the immediate thought of “What’s for Dinner.” Our food becomes a source of instant gratification, comfort or merely an annoying intrusion on our precious time that needs to be got out of the way as quickly as possible.
This is ironic as the emotional condition that dictates whether we are happy and fulfilled or not depends largely on our physical well being. And our physical state is fundamentally dependent on our diet. Many of those who suffer from lack of energy, drive and listlessness attribute these conditions to personal and environmental issues that often have nothing to do with them at all.
It is a tragic characteristic of our time that many people who come from affluent nations and are, on the face of it, well fed, actually suffer from malnutrition. That our children often suffer from obesity and lack of adequate nutrition simultaneously is a travesty and a serious indictment on a society that favours quick fixes above quality at all costs.
To further confound this already complex and thorny issue, much of the “healthy” food that we consume in an effort to address these problems is nutritionally lacking when it comes out of the ground. Mounting pressure to increase yields and profits have seen the emergence of agricultural practices that have driven soil quality to all time lows and introduced so many chemicals into the equation that in many cases you would be no worse off with a Burger and fries than with a garden salad.
With all of this bad news around how do we ensure good nutrition for our families and ourselves? The answer to that rather sticky question lays not so much in the structure of our diets but in an informed and realistic understanding of what good nutrition actually is. This is a very individualistic issue in that each person’s nutritional needs differ greatly. Fortunately medical and nutritional science has come a long way and there is very little reason why we cannot establish an accurate nutritional profile for our selves and our families.
And therein lays the secret to good nutrition. Not in the Dr. So and So’s no fat, not salt, no joy boiled chicken diet but rather in finding out what our specific nutritional needs are and being uncompromising in our attempts to meet those needs. There are as many diet plans and guaranteed fail proof nutritional guides around as there are legitimate or self professed experts on the subject. To claim any one or group of them as being a definitive answer to good nutrition would be like saying BMW’s only look good in black.
To approach good nutrition in a truly constructive fashion one has to medically establish what each member of your families particular needs are according to physical profile, pre-existing conditions and food allergies. Once this has been done there is a wealth of information available to establish which food types are necessary to meet those needs and where to find the best quality in those food types. And don’t forget that dietary supplements play an important role as well. The bottom line is that we should avoid following fads and act on our nutritional needs in an informed and uncompromising fashion.