1. Your diet affects your health. The foods you choose contain nutrients needed to keep you alive and healthy. The foods you choose determine which nutrients you consume. Poor choices can cause nutrient deficiencies and can contribute to chronic diseases as you age.
2. The typical diet in North America does not meet the recommendations for a healthy diet and contributes to the high incidence of chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
3. Nutrients are grouped into six classes: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, water, vitamins, and minerals. The right amounts of each of these is needed by the body for growth, maintenance and repair, and reproduction. Food also contains nonnutritive substances such as phytochemicals that may provide additional health benefits.
4. Nutrients provide energy, which is measured in calories. They provide structure to the body and regulate biochemical reactions and physiological processes to maintain homeostasis.
5. No food is good or bad, and no one food choice can make a diet healthy or unhealthy; each choice contributes to the diet as a whole.
6. A healthy diet includes a variety of nutrient-dense foods from each of the food groups as well as a variety of foods from within each group. It balances calorie and nutrient intake with needs and moderates choices to keep intakes of energy, fat, sugar, salt, and alcohol within reason. This diet will be rich in whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; high in fiber; moderate in fat, sugar, and sodium; and low in saturated fat, cholesterol, and trans fat.
7. The food choices we make are affected by many factors other than nutrition. They are affected by food availability; what we have learned to eat from our family, culture, and traditions; personal tastes; and what we think we should eat.
8. Nutrition uses the scientific method to determine the relationships between food and the nutrient needs of the body. The scientific method involves making observations of natural events, formulating hypotheses to explain these events, designing and performing experiments to test the hypotheses, and developing theories that explain the observed phenomenon based on the experimental results.
9. To be valid, a nutrition experiment must provide quantifiable measurements, use appropriate controls, choose the right type and number of experimental subjects, and interpret the results carefully.
10. Not all the nutrition information that comes to us is accurate. When judging nutrition claims, you need to consider whether the information makes sense, whether it came from a reliable source, whether the information is trying to sell a product, and whether it has been confirmed by multiple studies.
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