The Importance of Food Nutrition

Food nutrition entails taking a positive approach to choosing foods rich in nutrients to help keep you healthy.

What should you eat, or not eat, to promote good health? Lots of people struggle with this choice every day. Nutritional advice for decades has given us the answer to these questions, telling us what foods we should eat, and what foods we should avoid. And in actuality, although many Americans are obese, they are actually also undernourished.

The following helpful facts were reviewed by the American Dietetic Association.

We need to begin to educate ourselves and our children in food nutrition – we need to choose foods rich in nutrients, and those that provide solid nutrition with the least amount of calories. By doing this, we can set up healthier diets and begin a journey toward wellness and health.

Eating foods that are rich in nutrients emphasizes the ability to choose foods based on the value of the nutrients, including minerals and vitamins, rather than choosing foods based on what they don’t have, like salt, sugar and fat. This can offer you a foundation to help you build healthier habits and to more adequately meet your needs, nutrition-wise, over the course of your lifetime. Being able to choose the right foods can help you thing about enjoying eating again, because what you’re eating will be helping your health. Since foods that are good for food nutrition represent the standard food groups and are easy to find, they can help you in building a stress-free, healthier diet.

Choose foods first from these important types that provide good nutrition:

Whole-grain foods that are fiber rich

Lean meats, nuts, beans, eggs, fish and poultry

Low-fat or fat-free yogurt, cheese and milk

Bright colored fruits and vegetables

100 % fruit juice

Here are some other tips from the American Dietetic Association, to help you eat with your sight on good food nutrition:

Enjoy a tropical dessert by blending pineapple juice, ice, low-fat milk and mango. You can also stir in a bit of chocolate syrup into yogurt of a coffee flavor, and freeze it.

Serving healthy means using methods that give you lots of foods rich in nutrients. This includes broth-based, hearty soup that is full of lean meat, beans and colorful vegetables.

Make your oatmeal more creamy by adding fat-free milk in lieu of water – you can also mix in blueberries, cherries, cranberries and raisins to add flavor without many calories.

Cut and bag your vegetables to increase the amount of nutrients for your whole family. Eat veggies like yellow, green or red peppers, radishes, snap peas, cucumbers, celery sticks, carrots, cauliflower flowerets and broccoli. Keep fresh vegetables at hand so they’re ready to eat for snacks.