There has never been more chatter about food than nowadays, and we’ve never been surrounded by so much of it as we are at this point in our history. Yet, more than anything else, it has brought confusion and worries rather than fun and pleasure!

Our body is a highly complex machine that can be very efficient when we fuel it properly. The beauty in this complexity is that every individual needs a slightly different fuel, which also changes throughout an individual’s life. As we grow, our nutrient and energy requirements shift, and the key is to adapt to these dynamics.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines proper nutrition as a quantitatively sufficient intake of energy, building and ballast substances from various foods, combined with physical activity.

You may be thinking, what on earth does that mean? In other words, it is that one that provides the right amount of all needed nutrients essential for the complex processes in our body, always accompanied by physical activity. If the amount we intake is too low, we are drifting towards potential nutritional deficiencies. At the same time, if we consume too much, we risk developing diseases like obesity, diabetes or heart disease.

The fact is that an unbalanced diet, together with a lack of physical activity, is one of the main risks to our health. On the other hand, it is essential to highlight that a balanced diet does not exclude any food; the secret lies in variety, moderation and balance. These three principles of healthy eating are the foundation for each individual’s balanced diet and a good way to bring back fun and pleasure to your routines.

Variety

When I mentioned that our body is an efficient machine, I may have underestimated it slightly. According to last estimates, our body has 37 trillion cells, while it is believed that the number of chemical reactions occurring every second is an unbelievable 37 sextillion (37 with 21 zeros).

For it to work properly, we need many different nutrients that our body can’t make on its own but needs to get through the food we eat. No single food or even a food group contains all the essential nutrients that our bodies rely on getting from food. That is where the importance of the first principle of variety lies.

Depending on the similarities in their nutritional composition, different foods are divided into groups:

• Fruits and vegetables
• Grains
• The protein group (beans, pulses, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, nuts)
• Dairy
• Fats and oils

While fruits and vegetables will provide you with a range of vitamins, minerals and fibre, you won’t get enough protein or essential fatty acids, which are plentiful in the protein and fat & oils group, for example.

Variety is about including all these different food groups into your diet on a daily basis. But weekly, variety would mean mixing up different foods from one group. So, if one day you choose blueberries, carrots and spinach from the fruit and vegetable group, the next day you will go with apple, butternut squash and mushrooms. That is how you will achieve variety daily but also throughout time.

Moderation

One of the famous expressions of the Swiss physician and chemist Paracelsus, which he said nearly 500 years ago, will help describe the basis of this following healthy eating principle. He said: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing, not a poison.”

Water, for example, is crucial for our survival, but even water can be toxic in large amounts. For a person that weighs 75 kg, drinking 6 L of water at once could be lethal.

Moderation is a healthy eating principle that introduces us to the importance of eating food in the right amounts in order to support our health and not go to extremes, neither too low nor too high.
We usually see the moderation principle applied to foods high in alcohol, sugar, salt or saturated fat, mainly because of their high caloric/ nutritional value ratio. But in reality, that applies to every food; as much as eating ten doughnuts a day is not recommended, the same goes for other foods like avocado or bananas, which are generally considered very “healthy”.

Balance

Balance as a concept is not based on banning certain foods but is more concentrated on the amounts and the frequency at which we consume them. That would mean that we can once in a while indulge in a delicious burger when in a pop-up summer event (guilty!). As long as, for dinner, we decide to have a light salad or a stew, we are still following the principle of a balanced diet. On the other hand, if we choose to eat a steak with french fries, that wouldn’t qualify as such, would it?

Here, we come to the second dimension of this principle, which is about maintaining our optimal body weight. To maintain body weight, there has to be a clear balance between energy intake and expenditure. That would mean that the number of calories you consume should equal the number of calories you waste.

If we want to gain weight, we would have to increase our caloric intake to a point where it exceeds our energy consumption. On the contrary, if we want to lose weight, we would need to lower our caloric intake and/or increase our physical activity levels. Regardless of which is your case, the best and longest-lasting way to do it is by always keeping these three principles of healthy eating in mind.

Luckily, I have great news for you: the choice is ours! The way we look at food has a very strong impact on our choices. It should be considered neither a reward nor a temptation, but simply the fuel that our bodies need to function to the fullest of our potential. Another piece of great news is that this process doesn’t have to be dreadful but one that brings us joy and satisfaction with our choices and all the things we learn along the way.