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Good nutrition refers to your body getting all the essential nutrients, minerals, and vitamins to function at its best. It comprises nutrient-rich foods from all major food groups, including proteins, carbohydrates, healthy fats, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables.
The benefits of good nutrition go beyond just maintaining a healthy weight. A healthy diet makes you mentally and physically fit, affecting your well-being and performance over time. Further, it provides nutrients vital to recovery, growth, and prevention of diseases such as type-2 diabetes, heart disease, cancers, and obesity.
This article outlines the benefits of making healthy eating a part of your routine. Here’s the scoop:
A healthy diet helps with post-surgery recovery
Whether recovering from surgery or disease, the foods and drinks you consume can either aid or impede your recovery.
Your body needs to work hard to heal after surgery. Increased fatigue, inflammation, and a greater need for energy require good nutrition to aid the healing. Protein-rich foods, such as meat, fish, eggs, poultry, and nuts, can help fulfill your body’s protein needs. Fruits and vegetables contain healthy fats and protein sources that promote healing.
A healthy diet improves the odds of surviving serious diseases
A healthy diet helps you prevent the development of many diseases and improves the prognosis of some deadly and rare diseases, such as mesothelioma. However, early diagnosis plays an important part. If you or your loved one suffer from this rare cancer, visiting mesotheliomahope.com can provide a plethora of information on mesothelioma, its prognosis, types, and treatment options.
A balanced diet promotes heart health
Nearly one-third of all deaths around the world occur due to heart disease. Diet plays a critical part in your heart health and can affect your risk of developing heart disease.
The minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants in leafy green vegetables, such as collard greens, spinach, and kale, help lower cholesterol, blood pressure, inflammation, and triglycerides, all of which can affect heart health. Additionally, they contain dietary nitrates, which help reduce arterial stiffness and blood pressure, and vitamin K, which supports blood clotting and protects arteries.
Avocados are a great source of healthy fats (monounsaturated fats), associated with decreased cholesterol levels and a lower risk of stroke and heart disease. Adding whole grains, berries, fish, tomatoes, garlic, almonds, and walnuts to your diet can also improve your heart health.
Healthy diet will make bones and teeth stronger
A diet with enough magnesium and calcium is essential for both bones and your teeth. When your bones are healthy, you are less vulnerable to the bone problems, such as osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, later in life.
Foods rich in calcium include broccoli, dairy products, canned fish with bones, and kale. Some magnesium-rich foods are whole grains, leafy green vegetables, seeds, and nuts.
A healthy diet is beneficial for the eyes
People often assume that poor eyesight is either due to eye strain or aging. But the truth is a healthy lifestyle, including a balanced diet, can significantly decrease the risk of eye problems.
Nutrients, including vitamin A, Lutein and Zeaxanthin, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, zinc, and vitamin E, may help lower the risk of eye health decline.
A sufficient quantity of vitamin A may help prevent conditions like dry eyes and night blindness. Some of the richest sources of vitamin A include egg yolks, dairy products, spinach, carrots, and liver.
Lutein and zeaxanthin are carotenoids that protect your eyes from harmful blue light. They are usually found in spinach, kale, pistachios, sweet corn, red grapes, egg yolks, and green peas.
Omega-3 fatty acids are vital to your overall eye health, especially eye development during early childhood. The deficiency can lead to vision impairment in children.
Zinc, vitamin E, and vitamin C also decrease the risk of serious eye problems like cataracts and age-related macular degeneration.
It promotes healthy skin
What you eat can have an impact on your skin. Macronutrients, including proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, and micronutrients, including vitamins, and minerals, help maintain the skin barrier functions in the face of challenges.
To allow your skin to work, look, and feel good, you need to nourish it well. Healthy fats, proteins, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, and selenium are essential nutrients for good skin health.
A healthy diet will give you strong muscles
Keeping your muscular system healthy allows you to walk, run, lift things, jump, play, and do whatever you enjoy to the fullest extent possible. If you want your muscles to stay healthy and functional, you need to eat a well-balanced diet that includes whole grains, vegetables, fruits, lean meats, nuts, seafood (salmon), eggs, beans, low-fat or fat-free dairy products, such as cheese, milk, and yogurt.
Healthy nutrition benefits cognition and brain health
Research conducted in 2015 identified some foods and nutrients that help protect against dementia and cognitive decline. Vitamins C, D, and E, omega-3 fatty acids, fish, flavonoids, and polyphenols were all beneficial.
A healthy diet will improve immune function
Nutrition plays an important role in immune function. Diets that are low in nutrients, such as containing more ultra-processed and sugary foods, can disrupt healthy intestinal microorganisms, leading to chronic gut inflammation and suppressed immunity.
A high-fiber diet with plenty of vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains appears to promote the growth and maintenance of healthy microbes. Beneficial microbes decompose fibers into short-chain fatty acids that stimulate the actual cells. Prebiotics are substances that nourish microbes. Thus, prebiotic and probiotic-rich foods may help boost immunity.
Probiotic foods contain live beneficial bacteria and may include fermented vegetables, tempeh, kimchi, and kefir. A prebiotic food contains oligosaccharides and fiber that nourish and maintain colonies of beneficial bacteria. These foods include onions, garlic, bananas, seaweed, and asparagus.
Conclusion
A healthy diet ensures your body gets the necessary nutrients to work optimally. Employing a good nutrition plan with foods like lean meats, fruits, vegetables, seafood, whole grains, nuts, and seeds and reducing your sugar intake can solve many of your health-related issues. It helps your body heal and grow, improves your immune system, and protects you from chronic illnesses like heart disease, cancer, hypertension, arthritis, and eye disease.
