Examine the characteristics of a healthy diet, and the challenge associated with choosing the right foods.

A healthy diet includes the right amounts of macronutrients and micronutrients. Included in a healthy diet are adequate amounts of water and physical activity. To start, macronutrients are your fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. They are digested and absorbed through the stomach and intestines to be turned into nutrients the body needs. Physical activity helps encourage health and longer lives by strengthening the immune system, strengthening heart muscles and arteries, and lastly, by promoting lean, healthy body composition (Sizer & Whitney, 2011).

The challenge that is associated with choosing the right foods can depend upon availability, affordability, and nutritional education. If a person lives where food products are few and far between, possibly more rural areas, then they cannot always choose the right foods if they are not available. In addition, if prices are not affordable many people will opt for cheaper food product which tends to be high-calorie and full of fat. Nutritional education would be the knowledge one has about nutrition (i.e. choosing the right foods) and the fact that if someone has not been educated they are not likely to choose the right foods.

To conclude this blog and part of the final, I would like to discuss my personal choices in the right foods and even the wrong foods because of the education or lack thereof I have received. I guess now I can’t say that I have chosen the wrong foods because of education, rather motivation. Prior to these classes I was unaware of the risk factors associated with nutrition Anyway, I am in my second nutrition class because of my curiosity and concern about my health. Now I have knowledge and fear so to speak which allows me to want to choose the right foods. Plus, you feel better when you eat healthy versus all of that processed food out there.

Erin Christine Dorn