A Conversation for The Key to Getting a Balanced Diet
Balanced with what?
SasFlipper Started conversation Sep 18, 2003
The biggest problem with the idea of a balanced diet is the word 'balanced'.
Unfortunately, no-one really knows what it means. Nutritionalists tell us what they think the average person should be eating but very few of us are average.
A balanced diet is a very personal thing. Some people cannot tolerate sugar or starch and some cannot tolerate diary products and meat. There is no such thing as a one size solution. Each individual must determine which mix of food he must eat in order to gain the maximum nutritional benefit with the minimum risk to health.
Similarly, current advice for weight maintenance requires us to count calories in and calories out. But how easy is it to determine exactly how many calories you are eating? If all you ever eat is processed food, you could probably work it out from the label (much to the detriment of your health!). But what happens if you are preparing your own food? Sure, there are recipe books that give us calorific values for each serving but the truth is that few of us use a recipe book for our day to day food preparation and our ideas of servings sizes are very different.
So then we come to burning calories. Again, nutritionalists tell us what Mr Average burns off in an average day and various electronic gadgets tell us what he might burn off during twenty minutes on an exercise bike, but how do your calculate your own personal burn rate? How can you determine your own metabolic rate?
So effectively, they are asking us to perform a very simple subtraction calculation with infinitely complex variables. Hmmmm. No wonder it's not working!
The Key to Eating a Balanced Diet
fifivixen Posted Jul 13, 2005
Good read and I agree with most things said. I would however say that the pyramid triangle stated in the article is being revisited I believe. No longer are pasta, grains and legumes on the bottom but they are replaced by the layer above i.e. fruit, vegetables and nuts. See the G.I. (Glycemic Index) Diet for more info. Again, the GI Diet is not really a diet but more a change in lifestyle eating patterns. Written by Rick Gallop if anyone is interested.
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Balanced with what?
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