Steem for better health program #1: How healthy is your diet?
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Hello healthy steemians
Welcome to this week health program I want to start with a topic that will attract everyone of us so that all of us can benefits from it. We know that one common cause of disease or any sickness that we experience today is our diet so the question now is How healthy is your diet?
At the end of this health talk, we will know why it is essential for us to choose our diet wisely we will also know how are daily diets affect our health then we will see how we can use the common ingredients around us to live healthy.
Illustration
Have you ever seen a person who has stomach ache immediately after eating food or few hours after eating food?
Or
If your child or your brother or anyone close to you just tell you he or she is having stomach ache what is the first question you do ask?
I guess it will be what did you eat? So you see that what we eat contributes greatly to a health condition?
So let's find out this unhealthy diet we should avoid
- Junk foods
- Canned foods
- Uncooked foods
- Unnecessary eating combo
Therefore a healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition, it protects us against so many chronic noncommunicable diseases, which includes; heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So eating a variety of foods and limiting the consumption of salt, sugars and saturated industrially-produced trans-fats, are essential for healthy diet.
Healthy diet includes variety of meals which includes;
cereals; wheat, barley, rye, maize or rice
Carbohydrate; tubers or roots such as potato, yam, taro or cassava
Legumes; lentils and beans
Fruit and vegetables.
Animal produce; such as meat, fish, eggs and milk.
we have all this around us and we can actually afford them and consume them for the benefit of our health.
1. Breastfeeding
How long did you breastfeed your baby? Did you breastfeed your baby exclusively for 6 months?
A healthy diet should starts early in life, which means that breastfeeding has the role in healthy growth. It also has a long term benefits of reducing the risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing diseases later in life. Then, after feeding a baby exclusively for 6 months, parents should introduce a variety of safe and nutritious complementary foods at 6 months of age, while continuing to breastfeed till your child is two years of age and beyond. Which also plays an important part in human Healthy life.
2. Vegetables and fruit
These are really important to consume on a regular basis as they are a good sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, plant protein and antioxidants.
If you consistently make vegetables and fruits your regular diets, you will reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and certain types of cancer in your body.
3. Avoid excessive fat:
Eating the wrong kinds of fat, like saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. Therefore, the use unsaturated vegetable oils such as olive, soy, sunflower or corn oil will help you consume healthy fat.
4. Reduce sugar and salt intake
Reduce sugar intake by choosing fresh fruits instead of sweet snacks such as cookies, cakes and chocolate this will help reduce consumption of sugars. Mostly, reduce your intake of soft drinks, soda and other drinks high in sugars (fruit juices, cordials and syrups, flavoured milks and yogurt drinks) also helps reduce intake of sugars.
For salts, your intake should be reduced drastically to help prevent hypertension and reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke in the adult population.
After learning this what is the practical steps you should take when it comes to diet ? well, I know things are difficult especially in my home country and then affording a three square meal is very hard.
So people do well to eat according to their pocket size but then the food around us can help us go a long way in living healthy.
So vegetables and fruits is a little bit affordable or we can plant it at our backyard so we should make it a point of duty to plant vegetables and fruits at our backyard or at least we buy a little portion and be sure we take this it shouldn't be missing in our diets.
When it comes to consuming oil or the oil we use in a food if we can't afford vegetable oil pump oil is far more better for us, use fresh tomatoes while cooking, consume more of juice produced by you. Feed your kids with home made juice such as soy milk, fruits juice, zobo drinks etc.
By next week I will run a tutorial on how to produce one of these homemade juice.
Therefore we all should try as much as possible to eat healthy so that we stay healthy because health is wealth thank you so much for going through my post today, thank you for following a lovely health talk see you next week.
Meanwhile I'm open for any question at the comment section and also feel free to go through my previous health post here
Read the introduction here
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