Diet health essay

The core of a healthy diet has never been to strictly implement a certain popular recipe, and there is no "standard answer" that applies to everyone. A truly sustainable healthy diet is a low-burden, long-term dietary pattern established under the balance of individual metabolic characteristics, life scenarios, and dietary preferences.

To be honest, I have been doing community nutrition guidance for almost 4 years, and I have seen too many people eat themselves up. A while ago, a girl who works as a content operator for an Internet company came to me and said that she followed the Mediterranean diet for half a month and not only did she not lose a pound, but she ordered fried chicken and barbecue at midnight for three consecutive days and gained four pounds in one go. I looked at her time card and laughed - she worked overtime until 10:30 every day and didn't get home until 10:30. She also had to cook quinoa and mix vegetable salads with virgin olive oil. It was almost 12 o'clock after she finished eating. Her stomach was so bloated that she couldn't sleep. It was normal that she couldn't hold on.

What’s interesting is that now the factions in the nutrition circle about healthy eating are more quarrelsome than the rice circle. The low-fat pie talks about the macronutrient recommendations of the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents", saying that carbohydrates should account for 50%-65% of energy supply, and fat should be controlled at 20%-30%. Don't tell me, this is really useful for people with daily exercise habits and high basal metabolic rates. Several sports students I know have been eating according to this ratio, and their body fat rates have been stable at around 15% all year round, and they have enough energy. But the low-carb faction on the other side also has solid evidence. In 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published a follow-up study. For obese people with a BMI of more than 28 and severe insulin resistance, a short-term 6-month low-carb diet can indeed improve blood sugar and blood lipid indicators faster than an ordinary low-fat diet. However, tracking data for more than 1 year shows that the long-term persistence rate of this model is less than 10%, and many people also suffer from constipation, hair loss, and aunt disorder.

When many people talk about diet and health, they always ignore one of the core premise: you are not a subject living in a laboratory. You have your own work and life, and you cannot always revolve around the pot. I once met a class teacher who was a senior in high school. She had all her meals in the school cafeteria and had to sit in class even on weekends for self-study. Someone had given her a recipe that required her to eat 12 ingredients every day, but she couldn't do it and almost gave up. Later, the adjustment plan I gave her was very simple: buy vegetable buns from the cafeteria for breakfast, remove 1/3 of the skin, and add a tea egg and sugar-free soy milk. ； When cooking for lunch, I’ll eat half a plate of green leafy vegetables first, then one meat and one vegetable. I’ll eat as much rice as my fist. ； When preparing for lessons in the afternoon, if you feel hungry, gnaw on a small apple and don’t touch the Shaqima in the office drawer. With such a simple request, she persisted for more than three months, and the high triglycerides found in last year's physical examination returned to the normal range. She also said that she no longer feels sleepy in afternoon classes.

I found that many people have a very big misunderstanding about dietary health, that is, they think it must be "absolutely clean". A mouthful of milk tea or a bite of fried skewers is considered a failure, and then they simply break the jar. It’s really not necessary. I go out to eat butter hot pot with my friends once a week. I eat the ice noodles and crispy meat when I need them. I eat more vegetables and less staple food in the next two meals and make up for it. Is it possible that you still feel that your health is ruined just because you stay up late? When it comes to diet, the error rate is very high.

Take the hotly debated topic "Is zero sugar healthy?" For example, the WHO report issued in 2023 stated that long-term and large intake of sugar substitutes may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Many people used this report to criticize all zero sugar products as an IQ tax. However, clinical nutritionists on the other side will also recommend that diabetics with poor blood sugar control should temporarily replace sugary drinks with sugar substitute drinks, which can at least avoid large fluctuations in blood sugar. There is no absolute right or wrong, it just depends on what scenario you use it in and how much you eat.

In the final analysis, eating healthily is essentially a dialogue between you and your own body, not copying other people's work. If you feel comfortable after eating, have enough energy during the day, and have normal physical examination indicators, then even if you have to eat a bite of pickles every day, it is a healthy diet suitable for you. After all, good habits that last a lifetime are really useful. Those recipes that make you feel worse than death after eating them for a week are useless no matter how hyped they are.