Hello people! Welcome to our first health related blog post. This is an interesting series and I hope that you gain a thing or more. 😊
Many of us have heard the term “Balanced Diet” but do we really know what it entails? This article is to enlighten us on the components of the food we eat and how they affect our healthy living.
There are six major components of food, also known as nutrients and the way we combine these nutrients in our daily feeding matters alot. The process of combining these nutrients in the right proportion in a meal is what nutritionists refer to as Balanced diet.
Balanced Diet is a diet that contains all the nutrients needed by an individual in the right proportion. This means that the balanced diet of one individual may differ from that of another individual based on different factors that would be discussed in another write-up.
Today, we would look at each of the six classes of food (or nutrients) and what they do. These nutrients are classified into two broad groups. We have the macronutrients and the micronutrients. As the name implies, macronutrients are needed in large quantity by the body, these include: Carbohydrates, Protein, Fats and oils and water. On the other hand, micronutrients are needed in small or minute quantities by the body, they include: vitamins and mineral salts. Let us discuss each nutrient in detail, I would try to make it as interesting as possible🙂.
Carbohydrate:
Have you met this guy? Truth is you interact with him in your food than you do with other nutrients daily. We call him the Energy supplier. The function of carbohydrates in the diet is to provide energy for the body to carry out its functions.
Have you heard about Glycolysis and Kreb’s Cycle? They are the terms used to refer to the complex process through which energy is released from Glucose which is the smallest unit of a carbohydrate in the body.
Yes, Carbohydrate is a type of complex sugar/ polysaccharide made from the joining of two or more simple sugars/ monosaccharides (like glucose) by nature in plants and animals from which we source our food daily. Examples of Carbohydrates found in nature are starch, sucros, glycogen etc. Food that have high proportion of Carbohydrates include: Rice, yam, flour products, maize, sugar, honey etc. We call these foods, Energy giving foods.
NB: Carbohydrates and other nutrients are broken down by the digestive system of the body to their simplest form for them to actually start performing their roles in the body.
Thank you for reading to the end. I hope that you learnt something new. If so, kindly share your thoughts in the comment section. Please, don’t forget to react and share with others so that they can also learn. Watch out for the continuation of this series in the next post. Thank you! 🙂
ONE LOVE! 💖
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