Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Healthy diet
Summary
A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients such as protein, micronutrients such as vitamins, and adequate fibre and food energy.
A healthy diet may contain fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and may include little to no processed food or sweetened beverages. The requirements for a healthy diet can be met from a variety of plant-based and animal-based foods, although additional sources of vitamin B12 are needed for those following a vegan diet. Various nutrition guides are published by medical and governmental institutions to educate individuals on what they should be eating to be healthy. Nutrition facts labels are also mandatory in some countries to allow consumers to choose between foods based on the components relevant to health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) makes the following five recommendations with respect to both populations and individuals:
Maintain a healthy weight by eating roughly the same number of calories that your body is using.
Limit intake of fats to no more than 30% of total caloric intake, preferring unsaturated fats to saturated fats. Avoid trans fats.
Eat at least 400 grams of fruits and vegetables per day (not counting potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, and other starchy roots). A healthy diet also contains legumes (e.g. lentils, beans), whole grains, and nuts.
Limit the intake of simple sugars to less than 10% of caloric intake (below 5% of calories or 25 grams may be even better).
Limit salt/sodium from all sources and ensure that salt is iodized. Less than 5 grams of salt per day can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The WHO has stated that insufficient vegetables and fruit is the cause of 2.8% of deaths worldwide.
Other WHO recommendations include:
ensuring that the foods chosen have sufficient vitamins and certain minerals;
avoiding directly poisonous (e.g. heavy metals) and carcinogenic (e.g. benzene) substances;
avoiding foods contaminated by human pathogens (e.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.