You Are What You Eat - Discuss

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You Are What You Eat-Discuss

It is indeed true that the quality of food that you take in will do a great deal to determine the quality of life that goes on in each cell of your body. Food has a huge effect on your health, and a diet rich in any one aspect would be an unhealthy diet, in the same way that a diet lacking in a certain nutrient would also affect your health.

A balanced diet consists of carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals and water. Carbohydrate provides us with energy. Fats (lipids) with healthy cell membranes and an energy reserve. Proteins are essential for growth and repair or body tissues. Vitamins are needed to keep our cells working properly and minerals build molecules in your cells, such as calcium (Hudson, 1998). Although water is humans most essential component of our diet as we can survive weeks without food though only days without water. In a sense you could say that humans are what we drink as seventy percent of our bodies, and of most organisms are made up of water. Water is essential for every chemical reaction that occurs in the body. It makes up blood and is used to dilute toxins and be excreted as urine. The reason humans eat the foods that we do, and cannot share food groups with other animal, such as cows is because we do not have the enzymes to be able to digest these things. Cows are able to eat grass, which is very hard to digest because they have four stomachs and can allow the grass to ferment and break down before it is then digested. Humans eat the foods that their digestive system can cope with.

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We are given guidelines as to how much of each component of our diet we should eat. For example calories do vary from person to person depending on their level of activity, their gender, their size and so on. The averages for male and female are two thousand-nine hundred for males and two thousand-one hundred for females. Protein is recommended seventy grams for males and fifty-eight for females. Fat is ninety grams for a male and seventy for a female (Samuels & Henett, 1973). Although some amounts vary for male and female most vitamins are consistent for both sexes, like ...

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