Things that constitute a balanced diet

To lead a healthy and disease free life, a person needs to maintain a balance in his diet. People nowadays have more of an unhealthy diet containing high amounts of fats and make their bodies more prone to diseases. A healthy diet is a must in everyone’s life so that you can make your immune system much stronger than it presently is and also add a protective shield around your body to fight against various dangerous diseases. A balanced diet should be rich in components like minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, soluble fats, and fibers. All these should be present in not more not less but in optimum quantity in the body.

Benefits of maintaining a balanced diet

There are countless benefits of taking a balanced diet and these can be summarized as follows:

• ·You tend to be physically and mentally fit with the intake of balanced diet
• Improves your stamina to do physical work and also aids in concentrating even better
• Maintains an ideal body weight along with a balanced blood pressure level and heart rate
• Eliminated the growth of bad cholesterols and triglycerides in your body hence increasing the level of good cholesterols and maintaining the proper blood sugar level

Following is the list of components which constitutes a balanced diet and helps you maintain a healthy body:

Minerals and Vitamins

Various minerals needed by the body to stay healthy are calcium, potassium, iron, iodine, phosphorus, magnesium, manganese, zinc, fluoride, sodium, and many more. These minerals along with the vitamins like vitamin A, K, E, D, C, and B-complex help the body work properly.

The intake of these minerals and vitamins either through your daily diet or as supplements should be practiced so as to see effective results on your body and overall health. This importance can be measured from the fact that minerals like iron and calcium are essential for haemoglobin, teeth, bones and muscles whereas the vitamins like A and C are essential for eyes and body repair.

Proteins

Proteins are needed by the body to help it repair, heal itself and maintain its growth. Food like eggs, tofu, fish, lentils, meat, and beans are rich in proteins. Proteins are broken down by the digestive juices secreted and they finally make amino acids so that they can be released in to the blood as they cannot do that directly due to fact that they are very large in size.

Fats and Carbohydrates

Fats and carbohydrates are very important sources for building energy. The carbohydrates contain Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen and therefore it is named after them i.e. carbo meaning carbon, hydr meaning hydrogen and ates meaning oxygen. Even fats contain the same components and therefore both carbohydrates and fats are used for energy building.

Fiber

Fiber is another important component which constitutes a balanced diet. It is important to keep your digestive system fit so that it can work properly on roughage and allow it to be pushed through the intestines so that they can be excreted. Without the intake of fiber these excretions and movements do not properly take place.