Proper Diet

A Proper diet is not nearly as difficult as most people imagine it to be. In fact, many people shy away from eating a healthy proper diet because so many negative factors are associated with the word diet. Many kinds of diets can be bad for you and difficult to maintain. However, a healthy proper diet is very good for you and should become a way of life. A healthy proper diet can even help you extend your life by lowering your risk of chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. Maintaining a healthy proper diet does not necessary mean cutting down your food supply, it simply means eating right.

Here are some tips to help get you started:

• Eat five or more servings a day of green, yellow, and orange fruits and vegetables. They taste great plus they are loaded with antioxidants, which can help ward off cancer and other diseases.
• Make sure to include high-fiber foods in your daily diet. Foods in this group include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. These foods will supply your body with necessary dietary fiber plus many other nutrients that will help keep you healthy. These foods will make you full plus they are low in calories.
• Limit the amount of sugar, salt, and refined flour that you eat. Cut back on products like white bread, soda, and potato chips.
• Restrict your intake of red meat. Eating too much red meat can lead to high cholesterol. Instead, eat more poultry and lean meats.
  Instead of using butter and margarine, use olive oil and canola oil. It tastes great and is much better for your body.
• Do not consume more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol per day. Cholesterol is found in dairy products, egg yolks, meat, and poultry.
• Increase your intake of fish and nuts. They contain unsaturated fats, which are good for you.
• It is best to get your vitamins and minerals from the foods you eat instead of supplements. Although they may be helpful, supplements are not nearly as effective as eating a healthy diet.
• Make sure to get enough calcium. The best ways to do this are by drinking skim milk and eating low fat yogurt. Take a calcium supplement if needed.
• If you consume alcohol, do so in moderation. Drinking alcohol can add hundreds of empty calories. It can also lead to health problems.
• Maintain a healthy weight. If you are not sure what that is, consult your health care provider.
• Exercise three to four times per week. This exercise can be anything that keeps you moving for twenty minutes or more.

If you follow these tips, you will be on your way to developing and maintaining a healthy proper diet. You will soon feel better and look better. Once you get started, you will find out how easy this new lifestyle really is. Good luck! You're going to do great with your proper diet.

What is a Healthy Proper Diet?

What constitutes a healthy proper diet? This simple, seemingly obvious question has generated one of the most provocative scientific debates of modern times. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in nutrition studies over the past half century and thousands of papers published on nutrition in major medical journals, such as The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, the diet debate rages. Why has it been so difficult to unravel the truth about healthy eating or proper diet?

According to award-winning science journalist Gary Taubes, author of the best-selling book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" the controversy over the modern notion of "healthy diet" emerged in the 1950s, spurred by the research of a handful of charismatic and powerful figures, such as Dr. Ancel Keys. Keys and his like-minded colleagues became convinced by a slate of studies that the prevailing notion at the time - that a healthy diet was low in carbohydrates - was in fact dubious. In its place, these researchers posited that a healthy proper diet should be one that’s low in fat and cholesterol. They noted the high degree of correlation between high cholesterol levels and the incidence of so-called "diseases of civilization" - namely type-2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

Keys and fellow advocates of the low fat diet battled researchers - such as the late Dr. Robert Atkins - who rejected the hypothesis that the low fat diet was healthy and offered an alternative hypothesis that suggested that a low carbohydrate diet was in fact the true "healthy diet". During the 1970s, these two schools of thought on the subject of healthy diet battled for the hearts and minds of the scientific community. Despite ample research that suggested that the low fat diet hypothesis was not well confirmed (or at least was dubiously confirmed) through laboratory and clinical studies, the low fat school prevailed, and the notion that "a low fat diet is a healthy diet" became incorporated as dogma at institutions as revered as the American Heart Association and the U.S. Surgeon General's office. In the wake of this seismic shift, public health authorities began prescribing low fat, high carb diets en masse. Curiously, data show that the current "obesity epidemic" afflicting the United States corresponds very well with this recommendation to eat more carbohydrates and fewer fats.

Advocates of the "low carb is a healthy" school, like Taubes, have a long way to go to pierce the low fat dogma that has accumulated over decades. But mounting research suggests that the low carb hypothesis may in fact be vastly more correct and that a true healthy proper diet is one in which refined sugars and starches are severely curtailed.

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