Thursday, August 11, 2011

Health Nutrition & Nutritional Advice For Health and Wellbeing

It is possible to spend hours, days, even months or years trying to understand nutrition, how it connects to you individually and how you can improve your own diet and wellbeing with it!

Most of us want to lose some weight, look younger, feel better and stay well in order to enhance our vitality and health in general. We read endless articles and news on what is the new super food and why we need it. But do you really ever get it? Do you ever really understand what a vitamin is, or a mineral, or an antioxidant, or a free radical, why we need them all (or not), and what effects that can be caused if we do not have them?

As a human being, like it or not, you will change with age, stress, environment and circumstance, meaning that what you need nutritionally needs to change too! On top of that, holding onto unwanted toxins throughout stressful situations and life itself build up to make a difference to how we feel and how we look.

So what is this article about? Within this article I want to explain, as simply as possible, why health nutrition is vital to your life, wellbeing, energy, looks, children and future; what vitamins and minerals actually are and why we need them; how the environment has an effect upon us (like it or not) and what you can do to enhance your health and wellbeing on an individual level.

What is health nutrition?
Health nutrition is seeing what you eat as a way to enhance your health. It is understanding that you are what you eat, therefore making total sense to optimize your diet to get the most from your true health potential!

Taking this a step further, we therefore see that poor nutrition could damage our health and prevent us from reaching our true possibilities both emotionally and physically! As intelligent humans (really!), we have vital choices about our own health by what we consume? We are becoming fast more and more aware that diet and nutrition really is the key to true health potential and wellness.

What is a Vitamin?
Vitamins are micronutrients that are essential to human health nutrition. Most of the vitamins cannot be made by the human body and therefore need to be obtained via foods and supplements. Some vitamins are fat soluble and some are water soluble.

Fat soluble vitamins are found mainly in fatty foods such as animal fats, vegetable oils, dairy foods, liver and oily fish. These fats are stored in the liver and fatty tissues for future use and there for when you need them. These vitamins are vitamin A, D, E & K. Too many fat soluble vitamins could be harmful.

Water soluble vitamins are found in fruit, vegetables and grains. Unlike fat-soluble vitamins, they can be destroyed by heat or by being exposed to the air; they can also be lost in the water used for cooking (this is why some raw foods daily can really enhance your vitamin intake and therefore health potential). This means that cooked food, especially boiled, will lose lots of these vitamins, the best way to keep as much of the vitamins as possible inside the food is to eat raw, lightly stir fry or steam, gently grill, or heat on a very low temperature for a longer period of time, any of these will help to contain the water soluble vitamins much more.

Water soluble vitamins are: vitamin B6, B12, C, Biotin, Folic Acid, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, and Riboflavin & Thiamin.

What are minerals?
Minerals are essential nutrients that our bodies needs, in varying amounts, to work optimally. Mineral nutrients consist of two categories: the major essential elements which are: calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, iodine, and potassium; and the trace elements such as: copper, cobalt, manganese, fluorine, iodine, Chromium, selenium and zinc. All of these must be supplied in our diet because the body is unable to manufacture its own and can only maintain its mineral balance for short periods of time.
Minerals can be found in varying amounts in a variety of foods such as meat, cereals (i.e. bread), fish, dairy foods, vegetables, fruit (especially dried fruit) and nuts.

Minerals are necessary for three main reasons, a) to build strong bones and teeth, b) to control body fluids inside and outside cells and c) to turn food we eat into energy.
The trace elements are also essential nutrients that your body needs to work properly, but these are needed in much smaller amounts. Trace elements are found in small amounts in a variety of foods such as meat, fish, cereals, milk and dairy
foods, vegetables and nuts.

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