Understanding Food and Nutrition
Introduction
The importance of food
The food that you eat has a strong influence on your health and on your chances of developing diseases including heart disease and some types of cancer. This book is aimed at people who are basically healthy, to help them understand nutrition and choose a diet that will keep them in good health.
The opening chapters explain in detail how you digest food and why your body needs:
• energy
• protein
• fat
• carbohydrates
• vitamins and minerals.
These chapters include the science of nutrition, good food sources and links with illnesses, such as heart and bowel diseases and cancer.
Healthy eating
The chapter ‘Healthy eating’ enables you to put the information together so that you can plan a diet that incorporates appropriate amounts of the various food groups. This chapter also includes information on the safest and most effective way to lose weight.
To make informed choices about your diet, you need to know how to read the nutritional labelling on food packets, and to be aware of the various ways in which fresh produce may have been treated to increase its acceptability to consumers. This is covered in the chapters ‘Food labelling’ and ‘Food additives’.
Some people can’t eat certain foods or food additives for health reasons, even foods that are essential to a balanced diet. The chapter ‘Food allergy and intolerance’ gives information and advice about this.
There are many different nutritional products and diets available, which are claimed to enhance a balanced diet or to encourage rapid weight loss. These are discussed in the final chapter ‘Dietary supplements, alternative diets and “health foods”’.
This book provides an overview of nutrition. For people requiring further information on specific medical conditions or nutritional requirements (for example, vegans), there is a list of useful addresses at the back of the book.
