Considering we all eat food every single day in order to simply survive, there are a lot of parts of nutrition that are surprisingly not very commonly known. However, that doesn’t mean they aren't important! Healthy lifestyles always, without fail, start with good nutrition.
Nutrition is defined as the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth, according to Oxford Languages. However, what that actually entails can be far more complicated.
Nutrition and health are inseparably linked, so having a good understanding of all aspects of nutrition is crucial to a healthy lifestyle, and that is what we are here to discuss today.
How are nutrition and health connected?
The links between nutrition and health run almost deeper than can be properly put into words. Pretty much every aspect of one’s health can be, in some way, linked back to one’s nutrition.
Whether that is your physical fitness, your immune system’s vulnerability to disease, or even your mental health, nutrition reigns king over all of them. You can even study a degree in nutrition and food service management with the number of ways that nutrition can affect a person’s quality of life.
How are nutrition and physical degeneration linked?
Originally explored in a ground-breaking book by Dr Weston Price, the links between the nutritional trends that have followed us as a society throughout history and our overall health and evolution as a species is a fascinating area.
At its core, Price’s work suggests that we as a society have been so influenced by the foods that we eat, and the infrastructure and industry surrounding it, that we are actually more susceptible to disease than our ancestors were. If that isn’t an important reason to pay attention to your nutrition, than what is?
How are nutrition and mental health linked?
The inherent links between what we eat, and our mental state are an area that one could talk about for days and still not reach the end of. Both directly and indirectly, what we choose to eat and how that affects us can have a profound impact on our mental health.
Ever been called “hangry” before? This is a classic and very simple example of how nutrition impacts mental health. We are lacking in nutrients and energy, and thus we are unhappy, and this shows in our emotions, and we are “hangry”.
However, the links go further than this. As we are starting to realize, the human brain is ultimately just a part of an organism, like any other, that requires various nutrients to run, and produces different chemical outputs based on what it gets.
Deficiency of many of the key vitamins and minerals integral to a healthy diet such as B12 and Zinc can quite literally cause our brains to start producing chemicals that induce anxiety, fatigue, and even depression.
Eating healthy is vitally important to good mental health therefore, and failing to do so can even be a trigger behind deteriorating mental health!
This isn’t even the full extent of it, though. There are often shown to be very strong links between body image and mental health, especially among younger people.
This is why nutrition for kids and nutrition for teens can be even more significant, as eating the right things is the number one factor affecting your body.
It’s sadly still exceedingly common for young people to have concerns about their weight and physical appearance, and these problems are only getting worse in a social media age. This is why eating not only the right foods but the right amount of foods is so important.
Good nutrition allows young people to feel comfortable in their own bodies when they can be at their most vulnerable, which is beyond vital to letting them grow as people.
What does a nutritious diet look like?
Good nutrition literally starts with the nutrients, or what you put on your plate. Having a healthy nutritious meal is all about balance, so a balanced diet is essential to staying healthy.
Exactly what this looks like will vary from person to person based on their body type and their personal fitness goals, but there are some good standard baselines that you can use as a point of reference. As an example, here is a very basic breakdown of a healthy nutritious meal
- Protein: 25% or ¼. You would ideally want about a quarter of your meal on average to be protein, so that is meats, fish, nuts, cheese, and beans. Different proteins are healthier than others, such as chicken and fish being better than cheese and bacon, but they all fill the same role on the plate!
- Carbohydrates: 25% or ¼. You also want roughly a quarter of your meal to be carbohydrates. This amount will vary depending on your weight goals, but about 25% of your meal being rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, and so on is a good medium to aim for.
- Vegetables: 50% or ½. Half your plate should ideally be vegetables, and the more variety the better. Vegetables are the backbone of healthy eating, so getting as many of them in you as possible is almost always only a good thing. They really are the often-overlooked superfood, with many vegetables bringing countless different minerals and vitamins that are integral to good health.
Aside from these percentages, the other thing to worry about is the overall amount of food. The amount of food required to maintain your current weight will vary from person to person, and is called your maintenance calorific intake.
For most adults, this will be somewhere in the 2000 calories per day region.
Which nutrition is good for weight loss?
If you want to change your weight in any way, you make alterations to both the amount of food you are eating, and it’s composition. In the case of weight loss, this means reducing the overall amount, as well as reducing the relative amount of carbs.
Reducing the overall amount is called creating a calorie deficit, which is the backbone of weight loss. You normally want to aim for about a 20% overall reduction per day, so if your maintenance calorific intake is 2000 calories, then reduce it down to 1600 calories per day.
In terms of meal composition, you will also want to change this, ideally reducing the amount of carbohydrates. A healthy example might be going from 25/25/50 down to something like 30/10/60, with 30% protein, 10% carbohydrates, and 60% vegetables.
Note that we do not remove carbohydrates entirely, we simply reduce them. Carbs still do good things as well!
Which nutrition is good for weight gain?
This question tends to overlap very much with which nutrition is good for muscle gain, but fortunately the technique for both of these overlaps considerably. You basically do the opposite of what you do for weight loss, by increasing your calories per day to create a calorie surplus.
The increase should be similar, so if your maintenance calorific intake is 2000 calories, then you might increase it to 2400 per day.
You also then want to increase the relative amount of protein in your meals, so the 25/25/50 split might go to something like a 35/20/45, with 35% protein, 20% carbohydrates, and 45% vegetables. This is because protein is the nutrient that is good for muscle growth.
Are nutrition labels accurate?
The answer to this one is a bit of a complicated yes and no. They aren’t entirely accurate in that they are good estimates but can be up to 20% off either side of what they estimate, although in practise this is usually only around 2% inaccurate.
However, as a result of normally being within 2%, they are still a very good estimate, and easily good enough for you to use to plan your nutrition around.
Nutrition is rarely going to be numerically perfect anyway, as getting the mathematically perfect ratio of every single nutrient is borderline impossible just due to the way most ingredients are even sold.
Therefore, while there may be some very small deviations between what the label says and the actual contents of that specific can of tuna, they are close enough for your calculations.
Start your Healthy Lifestyle
Finding a healthy diet and lifestyle for your exact needs and schedule can be an almost impossibly daunting task, and one that you simply cannot approach on your own.
Sorting out the exact macros you require and the exact menu that will get you to your fitness goals the fastest is something that would require an expert in nutrition to make even remotely feasible. Fortunately, such experts are available.
Having a nutritional coach such as those found here on Superprof can make finding the nutritional targets that are right for you much easier, especially since it saves you having to get a degree in nutrition and dietetics.
All the nutritional tutors on superprof are experts in the field, and can help you set up a healthy plan to ensure all your fitness and health goals will be met. You only get one body, and keeping it healthy is the only way to look after it, so why not give it the very best care?
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