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The Importance of Healthy Eating
Have you ever heard the saying you are what
you eat? In some sense, this is true, because if you eat unhealthy foods you are
prone to be an unhealthy person. The foods we ingest are extremely important to
our ability to grow, maintain function, and prevent illness. Therefore, if you
value your health, you should learn as much about healthy eating as possible.
Healthy eating is important from the day we
are born. As a child, we grow quite rapidly and this is due in part to the foods
we eat. Foods all contain nutrients that provide us not only with fuel to live
our daily lives, but also with the very substances that build our bones,
muscles, and organ tissues. Not getting enough of one nutrient or another can
cause a variety of problems, including stunting our growth. For mothers who are
nursing, nutrition is important because breast milk contains the nutrients a
child needs to grow and develop properly. Upon growing older, these nutrients
are then found in food, but don’t think that healthy eating isn’t important for
growth after you’ve gone through puberty. Cells continuous break down and
rebuild, so healthy eating for growth continues to be important until the day we
die.
Maintaining function is also not important
without healthy eating. In out daily lives, we use energy to think, walk, talk,
breathe, and perform any other action. The energy it takes our body to do these
things comes from two places: fat reserves in the body or our daily food intake.
If you don’t eat healthy foods, you will find that you are storing more fat that
necessary or that you aren’t getting enough and you feel sluggish or weak. Along
with energy-providing nutrients, like fats and carbohydrates, we also need the
right nutrients to allow our organs to do their jobs. Hormones and other
substances in the body make sure that everything is working properly. If you
don’t eat the right nutrients, your body cannot produce these hormones and, as a
result, cannot function properly.
Lastly, healthy eating is important in order
to prevent illness. When we do not get the right nutrients, or body’s natural
defense system against diseases weakens, allowing viruses and bacteria to attack
the body. It’s like a well-trained army—if the army doesn’t have enough to eat,
it will not do well in battle. Without healthy foods and plenty of water, our
bodies simply could not operate on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to eat
healthy foods is therefore and important lesson, and one which we should begin
learning as children.
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