Understand Food Groups Blog-1

 

:UNDERSTAND 

FOOD GROUPS:

Vadani kaval ghetaa naam ghyaa shri-hariche |

Sahaj havan hote naam ghetaa phukaache ||

Jivan kari jivitvaa anna he purna-brahma |

Udar-bharan nohe jaanije yadnya-karma ||

Food sustains life hence it is Purna Brahma. So it's not just about filling your belly, but it's a worship of the god. This food must be eaten in the proper way, hence proper food items, arrangements, meal timings and most importantly a peaceful atmosphere while eating food is needed.

Balanced diet, it is always recommended to have a balanced diet on a daily basis for a healthy life. One must choose a variety of food items in his daily diet. Healthy diet helps you to maintain and improve overall health. Once you start choosing food correctly all your food related digestive issues any metabolic disorders start to resolve more easily.

 

Eating a variety of food is important to get all essential nutrients which are required for optimum health. We have always seen in our indian tradition menu we have a lot of food items prepared in a thali. These food items are cooked with a variety of ingredients, which makes a thali as a whole meal. Today in the era of ready to eat, easy to make food items, what we need to learn again is our traditions. Because our traditional food is purely based on different food groups. All of the traditional menus like what we cook at our festivals highly depend on the season. Seasonal vegetables, seasonal sweets etc are made on different festivals.

So basically what we need to do is go and start following our traditions with the modern tadka!

Dietary diversity is important. It's a qualitative measure of food consumption that reflects a household access to a variety of foods. For a healthy adult balanced diet should be as follows:

Calories from carbohydrates- 50-60%

Calories from proteins- 10-15%

Calories from fat- 25-30%

So to get optimized nutrition from diet one must learn about the food groups

 There are ten food groups which are as follows-

1. Cereals, Grains
2. Pulses and legumes
3. Nuts and oilseeds
4. Dairy and products
5. Meat, fish and poultry
6. Dark green leafy vegetables
7. Vitamin A and C rich fruits and vegetables
8. Other vegetables
9. Other fruits
10. Egg

 One must choose food items from all these food groups to have a balanced diet every day.

To understand how much one should choose from every food group we have a Food Pyramid!

●     Cereals, pulses millets are major sources of energy and most nutrients hence they should be consumed in an adequate amount.

●     Vegetables and fruits provide many micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients hence should be consumed liberally. Choose a variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables.

●     Milk and alternatives, meat and meat products, eggs, fish, poultry, etc provide a good amount of good quality high biological value proteins and iron, hence should be consumed moderately.

●     Fats, oils, sugar and their products like sweets, icecreams, french fries, chocolates, colas, etc foods are high in HFSS i.e. high foods in salt and sugar which should be consumed sparingly.

 All these food groups provide us the nutrients which are required for the nourishment of the body. These nutrients are divided into two types, one is macronutrients another is micronutrients.

We have many subtypes in both macro and micronutrients. In the next blog you will understand each type of macronutrient and micronutrient, sources and importance of each.

Till then a short message, what we need is a balanced diet for a healthy life. Do not concentrate only one food group or only some food items, a single food will not provide you every micronutrient. Hence to get an optimum dose of micro and macros you need to choose seasonal variety of food items.