The nutrients you need to grow and repair help you stay strong and healthy and help prevent diet-related diseases, such as some types of cancer. Diet is essential for maintaining a healthy weight. Maintaining a healthy weight means you're less likely to have complications, such as high blood pressure and irregular blood sugar levels, and you're at lower risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other weight-related diseases. You're also likely to have a better quality of life and greater self-confidence when you're at a healthy weight.
Good nutrition is essential to keep current and future generations healthy throughout their lives. A healthy diet helps children grow and develop properly and reduces the risk of chronic diseases. Adults who eat a healthy diet live longer and have a lower risk of obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer. A healthy diet can help people with chronic diseases to manage these conditions and avoid complications.
Thinking about food in this way gives us a vision of nutrition that goes beyond calories or grams, good or bad foods. This point of view leads us to focus on the foods we should include rather than on the foods we should exclude. The CDC Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity uses national and state surveys to track breastfeeding rates and eating patterns across the country, including fruit, vegetables, and added sugar consumption. According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Nutrition Society in February 2001, what you eat can also determine your mental state.
When functional medicine professionals examine the role of nutrition in chronic diseases, they look at multiple systems, such as the digestive system, the immune system, and the detoxification system, because of the interconnections between those systems. When taking a nutritional approach to health and disease, it's important to understand that a disease can have multiple causes and an underlying dysfunction can cause multiple diseases. The nutritionist observed that she was suffering from systemic inflammation, fluid retention, bloating and constipation, and suspected that she was sensitive to food. However, when healthy options are not available, people can settle for foods with more calories and less nutritional value.
The CDC Healthy Schools program works with states, school systems, communities, and national partners to promote good nutrition. Functional medicine is a dynamic approach to evaluating, preventing, and treating complex, chronic diseases through nutrition. Data from these surveys are used to understand nutrition trends and differences between population groups.
