Bad Effects Of Nutrition Imbalance

While people often associate imbalanced nutrition with people in developing countries, where the food supply is improper, imbalance nutrition occurs with people of developed countries as well. Knowing more about what the body needs for proper nourishment and how people are challenged to receive adequate nutrition can help them prevent imbalanced nourishment in themselves and in those they know and love.

Biologically, people are intended to eat from a wide variety of foods, but the typical person consumes a very narrow selection of foods. These foods are often highly processed and stripped of many essential nutrients. In addition to this, stress, medications, environmental toxins and tissue injury can further increase the need for nourishment. An extreme lack of a specific nutrient can result in various diseases. For example, scurvy is the gum disease which results from severe lack of Vitamin C. Such diseases are what most of the people associate with imbalanced nutrition. Less acute nutritional deficiencies can still affect proper functioning of the body such as in the brain, height, weight, and eyesight, the functioning of various organs, as well as the development and formation of body parts, especially in unborn babies, newborn babies, and young children.

How do people protect themselves from the dangers of malnutrition! They can first turn to the Food Pyramid for a bit of guidance. For vegetables and fruits, the Food Pyramid suggests that they eat about nine servings of a variety of fresh, raw fruits and vegetables each day. Unfortunately most of the people are not eating this minimum and a recent report from the economic research arm of the USDA stated that we would need an additional six million acres of farmland to grow enough of this produce to support this minimal need for the American diet. This suggests that they are most certainly not getting sufficient nutrition from food alone.

A second option to improve nutrition is to add freshly made juices to the diet. Juice extractors are very affordable and work by grinding away the extra fiber and cellulose from a vegetable or fruit and channeling the juice into a container. The juices are generally sweet. Even a juice made from spinach and celery has a sweet flavor. Making the own juice provides better nourishment than pre-packaged juices and is not likely to contain added sugar, or preservatives, unless people are adding those. The downside to juicing is that juice extractors generally tend to make a mess, and must be cleaned immediately after use.

The third option is to supplement the diet with food-based, consistent nutritional supplements. This means supplements which are made by concentrating nutrients from food sources and are then tested to ensure that the final product provides those nutrients in a constant fashion.

Unfortunately, most nutritional supplements do not meet these standards so it is important that if people are going to use dietary supplements, to fill in the holes of their diet, they must find ones that are effective instead of reaching for the cheapest, mega-sized bottle of chemically manufactured multivitamins you can find. Studies have shown that people who are well-nourished tend to get ill less often and recover quickly from injury and disease when such measures occur. A good diet is good when people eat more whole foods, ensure that there are no gaps in vital nutrients from day to day and also limit their exposure to things which can harm them.

• John Palsson
• 21/11/2008, 12:10 AM
• 0 Comments