Balanced diet ; A myth or a reality?

Wise Chukwudi Letsa Life Jan - 30 - 2015 , 01:59

A balanced diet is defined as food that supplies the body with all the food nutrients in their right proportion. Food nutrients are the active parts of the food.

There are six food nutrients and these are carbohydrates, proteins, fats and oils, vitamins, minerals and water.

Regardless of the colour, shape, texture, palatability and general appeal of the food you eat, the only thing important to the body are the nutrients. That is to say that a good enough emphasis needs to be laid on the nutritional composition of the food one eats.

The other qualities are also very important because they go a long way to help people eat.

Must a balanced diet be expensive?

I do not hold the view that a balanced diet needs to be expensive. Anyone who can afford food of any amount can also afford a balanced diet.

With appropriate knowledge and a little discipline, the foods available to us can be combined to give all the nutrients that we need anytime we eat.

Roasted plantain and roasted groundnut, also known as “Kofi broke man,” if taken in a right combination with a serving size of fruits perfectly qualifies as a balanced meal.

Balancing your breakfast does not necessarily mean that you should eat cheese, butter and margarine; which are expensive commodities in our part of the world. It is not a must to have fruit juice at meal time if you want to attain a balance of nutrients and energy.

I also want to dispel the notion many people hold that before they can be seen as eating a well balanced diet, they must be buying the food from a restaurant. It is not true.

There is enough quality food just around you at home. Learning to combine them to achieve desirable results will do us a whole lot of good.

Finding a solution in our rich food resources

We are blessed with foods like cassava, yam, plantain, maize, rice, wheat, millet, cocoyam, among others that serve as the main contributors of carbohydrates to our diet. These foods are ever abundant everywhere you go in this country.

We get a lot of fish from the waters around us; the sea, rivers and lakes. They provide us with good protein.

Look at the goat meat, the beef, the mutton, the pork, the bush meat and all the chicken which also provide us good quality protein as well.

We have eggs from chicken also giving us protein of the highest biological value.

Legumes such as beans and groundnuts also give us some amount of protein. Some cereals also provide us with some protein in addition to the carbohydrates they largely provide.

There are so many varieties of oils and other products that provide us with the nutrient called fats and oils. There is palm oil in abundance; there are vegetable oils also in abundance in Ghana. All these contribute nutrients and energy to our diet.

There are so many kinds of fruits around us such as banana, orange, pineapple, watermelon, apples, among others. These provide us with almost all of the vitamins and minerals that we need.

Other sources of vitamins and minerals are our vegetables; kontonmire, ademe, okro, garden eggs, tomatoes, pepper, among others.

When foods from these local sources are combined into our great and delicious meals such as banku and okro soup with pork, fufu and goat light soup, just to mention a few, we are already on our way to achieving a balanced meal.

What the WHO recommends

For food to be balanced, the nutrients must be present in the right proportions. In the real sense of the above definition, food has to be measured, in most cases weighed and calculations done to arrive at a balanced meal. This is actually recommended for everyone.

Those who want to do actual dieting should see a dietician and get a well calculated diet plan. This will, however, depend on a lot of factors which will also be assessed.

The World Health Organisation recommends that 55-65 per cent of energy (calories) should come from carbohydrates, 25-35 per cent from fats and oils and 10-15 per cent from proteins.

Calories simply represent the unit of measurement of the energy value of food. Just as weight is measured in kilograms, the energy value of food is measured in calories. These figures and percentages do call for calculations.

Important roles of fruits, vegetables and water

Fruits have to be taken in appropriate quantities three or five times daily. We, however, have to desist from eating large amounts of fruits at a time. Only one orange or apple, for instance, qualifies as a serving size of fruit. Pineapple and pawpaw cut to the size of a sardine tin also qualify as serving sizes.

Every other fruit has a specific serving size. Quantities of fruits, however, do change based on an individual’s health status. Your soups and stews should be done with the vegetables. Up to a cup full of fresh vegetables can be eaten or added to a meal.

Almost 70 per cent of our body weight is water. All reactions that are necessary for life and upkeep of the body occur in a water medium in the body.

Toxic end products of reactions in the body are excreted via water either in sweat, urine or by evaporation. In our climate, it is estimated that we lose close to 3000ml (3L) of water daily. A similar volume of water, therefore, has to be taken to replace the loss.

The specifics

The overall calorie that every individual must consume varies from person to person and is specific to a person’s age, weight and activity level, and they ought to be followed.

When you report to the dietician, he or she first assesses your nutritional status; they also take your dietary history and then review your laboratory results. The stage is then set for dietary advice and interventions.

This might be helpful

Eating a balanced diet presents us with a lot of benefits. First, we will be able to build a strong immune system that will enable you to fight diseases more effectively.

Disease can be better managed if we can consume well balanced diets. The diet, however, does not only need to be balanced but also it must be healthy. Make sure that food is stored well under the best of storage conditions.

Too much of any particular food nutrient source makes food bad. This has dire consequences.

The choice left to me now is to strive to eat well balanced meals. What about you?

The writer of this article is a dietician at Trust Hospital & Clinics. He is the author of the book titled: “Diet, Health & Wellness”. Wise Letsa also produces video and audio diet advice on CDs titled: “Eating for health & Wellness”. For copies of his book and CDs, Contact: 0244090262, Email: wcletsa@wiseletsa.com; Website: www.wiseletsa.com.