Examine How Diet Can Affect Health

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Factors that Effect Health: Diet

Diet means the kind of food a person customarily eats and this can affect someone positively or negatively, e.g. healthy eating can have a positive effect on someone. Healthy eating is consuming the right quantities of food from a range of foods. This is known as a balanced diet and this is essential to be healthy because if you don’t consume the right amount of foods, an excessive amount of sugar and salts, can result in being malnourished. It is important for us to eat healthy because it gives our body the nutrients it needs to perform physically and can strengthen our immune system. Healthy eating doesn’t only affect us physically, it can affect us emotionally, intellectually and socially. An example would be a person consuming an excessive amount of food or not eating the right proportion can make them feel insecure about their body, which would affect someone emotionally.

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Physical Health

A person’s diet can have a positive impact on their physical health. I’ve already mentioned that eating the right proportion can strengthen the immune system and give us the nutrients we need to perform physically. This is important because strengthening the immune system would mean fighting foreign intruders, like pathogenic bacteria and viruses and would also destroy cells within the body that may become an illness. Eating high amounts of fruits and vegetables would decrease infections, which would fasten the healing of injuries and infections and would decrease vulnerability to symptoms and difficulties from immune system dysfunction. According to Live Science article on the ‘Good Diet, Exercise Keep the Brain Healthy’, eating a well-balanced diet would mean “protecting the brain from damage, and counteracting the effects of aging." This is positive impact because the brain is delicate, so it would be essential to shield the brain because damaging the brain would affect a person mentally, physically, socially and emotionally. Counteracting age would be beneficial because it would enable someone in the life stage of late adulthood be physically healthy because they can do exercise and do sports since they are counteracting age. Carolyn Robbins article on The Positive Effect of Health also shows the importance of diet. The article states that “giving your body the correct fuel will give you more energy and an overall sense of well-being.” This links to what I mentioned about nutrients providing the fuel we need to perform physically, food provides energy.

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However, diet can have a negative impact on a person’s physical health. Physical activities are a great way of maintaining a healthy body, but an excessive amount of exercise would cause health problems. The person can feel tired, catch illnesses easily, is regularly sore and may have lack of sleep. This would make the person’s physical health weaken and may lead to affecting the other PIES. An excessive amount of salt and sugar can lead to illnesses such as diabetes or coronary heart disease, these bad habits can be passed on to family members. Passing on bad eating habits would result on children becoming obese and vulnerable to diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. It is important to have a balance proportion of carbohydrates, fats, proteins, dairies, and fruits and vegetables. This is significant in diet because eating too much would result on the person becoming obese, this later can result on bigger health problems. Nursing Times article states malnourished occurs when a person “has a poor diet that provides them with an incorrect balance of the basic food groups.” This means that a person has consumed an imbalance amount of food from the food group. For example someone may eat more dairy product than fruits and vegetables. This would affect someone physically because it would result on slower immune system and reduce muscle and tissue mass.

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Intellectual Health

Diet can affect people intellectually, eating a balanced diet can boost intelligence because a person is able to be more focused due to the nutrients being provided. Nutrients are important for growth. In taking the right amount of food would result on a person’s brain functioning properly. Oily fish is an example of food that boost a person’s intelligences. Disabled World article on “Why Fish Oil is Brain Fuel” states that the “long chain polyunsaturated Omega 3 fatty acids are the building blocks of the brain itself and are only found in any significant quantities in oily fish and of course fish oil.” These help strengthen the synapses in your brain related to memory. This is a positive impact on a person’s intellectual health because Omega-3 acid are beneficial for lowering blood pressure and Dr Madeleine Portwood have steadily found that fish oil expands behaviour, concentration levels and learning in the classroom. A high concentration level is essential for learning new information because if you are not focused than you would not process the information and therefore resulting in poor intellectual development. Good behaviour would improve a person’s contribution to learning and this would lead to improving the learning atmosphere in classrooms.

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However, diet can have a negative impact on a person’s intellectual health because eating the wrong proportion of food can affect someone academically. For example; a student studying for exams should stay away from processed food because it can lead to them feeling drained due to the chemicals in the ingredients. This would decrease the performance of the student in the exam and therefore, the student would achieve a grade that is not their potential. Fossette Allane article on ‘How Does Healthy Eating Affect Physical, Mental & Social ...

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