Impacts of Food and Nutrition on Human Health

Human nutrition is concerned with the availability of vital nutrients in food that are required to sustain human life and good health. Poor nutrition is a persistent issue often related to hunger, food security or a lack of awareness of dietary needs. Malnutrition and its effects are a significant contributor to mortality, physical deformity and disease worldwide. Good nutrition is required for children to grow physically and mentally, and for normal human biological development.

Effective control of food consumption and diet is essential for good health. Good diet and dietary preferences will help avoid illness. Eating the right foods will help the body deal with an ongoing disease more effectively. Understanding healthy nutrition and paying attention to what you eat can help you preserve or improve your health.

Definition of Good Nutrition

Food and nutrition are the way we get fuel to provide our bodies with energy. Every day, we need to substitute foods in our bodies with fresh supplies. Water is an essential nutrient component. Fats, proteins and carbohydrates are all required. Maintaining essential vitamins and minerals is also important for maintaining healthy health. Vitamins such as vitamin D and minerals such as calcium and iron are essential for pregnant women and adults over 50 years of age when selecting food to consume, as well as potential dietary supplements.

A proper diet contains a lot of natural food. A significant portion of a daily meal should be made up of fruits and vegetables, particularly those that are red, orange or dark green. Whole grains, such as whole wheat and brown rice, can also be part of the diet.Dairy products for adults should be non-fat or low-fat. Protein may consist of lean meat and poultry, seafood, eggs, beans, legumes and soy products such as tofu, as well as unsalted seeds and nuts.

Healthy diet also means eliminating certain types of foods. Sodium is commonly found in packaged foods and is harmful to those with elevated blood pressure. The USDA suggests that adults eat fewer than 300 milligrams (mg) of cholesterol a day (found in meat and full-fat dairy products among others). Cooked meats, solid fats and trans fats present in margarine and refined foods can be detrimental to heart health. Refined grains (white flour, white rice) and refined sugar (table sugar, high fructose corn syrup) are both harmful to long-term health, particularly in people with diabetes. Alcohol can be harmful to health by more than one serving a day for a woman and two servings a day for a male.

Nutritional Needs for Healthy Living

For the body to maintain a good health status, the body requires the seven major classes of nutrients in the right proportions. Seven main nutrient groups are carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, proteins, vitamins, and water. Nutrients can be grouped as either macronutrients or micronutrients (needed in small quantities). Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins are macronutrients that provide energy. Water and fiber are macronutrients, but they do not provide energy. Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals.

Macronutrients (excluding fiber and water) supply structural content (amino acids from which proteins are made and lipids from which cell membranes and some signaling molecules are made) and energy. Vitamins, minerals, fiber and water do not provide energy, but are essential for other purposes. The third type of dietary substance, fiber (i.e. non-digestible material such as cellulose), still seems to be required for both mechanical and biochemical purposes, but the exact reasons remain uncertain. For both age groups, males on average need to eat more macronutrients than females. In general, the consumption increases with age before the second or third decade of life.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates can be categorized as monosaccharides, disaccharides or polysaccharides based on the amount of monomers (sugar) that they contain. They are a complex group of substances with a number of chemical, physical and physiological properties. They make up a major part of foods such as rice, pasta, bread and other grain-based items, but they are not necessary nutrients, which implies that people do not need to consume carbohydrates.

Fat

Dietary fat usually consists of multiple fatty acids (containing long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms) bound together with glycerol. Fats can be categorized as saturated or unsaturated based on the chemical composition of the fatty acids concerned. Saturated fats (usually from food sources) have been a staple in many world cultures for centuries. Unsaturated fats (e.g. vegetable oil) are known to be healthier, whereas trans fats are to be avoided. Saturated and certain trans fats are normally stable at room temperature (such as butter or lard) while unsaturated fats are usually liquids (such as olive oil or flaxseed oil). Trans fats are very rare in nature and have been proven to be particularly dangerous to human wellbeing, but have valuable properties in the food production industry, such as resistance to rancidity.

Fiber

Dietary fiber is a carbohydrate, specifically polysaccharide, which is not entirely processed in humans and in some animals. As other carbohydrates, when metabolized, it may contain four calories (kilocalories) of energy per gram, although in most situations it is less than that owing to its reduced absorption and digestibility.

The two subcategories are insoluble and soluble fiber.

Insoluble dietary fiber: It consists mostly of cellulose, a large carbohydrate polymer that is indigestible to humans, because humans do not have the necessary enzymes to break it down, and the human digestive system does not have enough of the types of microbes that can do so.
Soluble dietary fiber: Contains a range of oligosaccharides, waxes, esters, resistant starches and other carbohydrates dissolving or gelatinizing in water. Many of these soluble fibers which be fermented or partly fermented by bacteria in the human digestive system to create short-chain fatty acids that are consumed and thus have a certain caloric value.

Whole grains, beans and other legumes, fruit (especially plums, prunes and figs) and vegetables are good sources of dietary fiber. Fiber critical for digestive health and is thought to reduce the risk of colon cancer. Fiber can help minimize both constipation and diarrhea by rising and softening the weight and size of the feces. Fiber supplies the intestinal material to a significant degree, and insoluble fiber induces peristalsis in particular.

Protein

Proteins form the basis of many animal body structures (e.g. muscles, skin, and hair) and form enzymes that control chemical reactions throughout the body. Each protein molecule is made up of amino acids containing nitrogen and sometimes sulphur (these components are responsible for the distinctive smell of burning protein, such as the keratin in hair). The body requires amino acids to produce new proteins (retention of proteins) and repair degraded proteins (maintenance). Amino acids are soluble in the intestinal juices in the small intestine where they are absorbed into the blood.

Water

Water is excreted in various ways by the body, including urine and feces, sweating, and water vapor in the exhaled breath. It is also important to rehydrate sufficiently in order to absorb drained fluids. Early recommendations for the quantity of water needed for the preservation of healthy health recommended that 6–8 glasses of water a day should be kept to a minimum to ensure adequate hydration.

Minerals

Dietary minerals are inorganic chemical elements needed by living organisms, other than the four elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that are found in almost all organic molecules. Some of them have positions as cofactors, while others are electrolytes. Many dietitians prescribe that these be taken from foods in which they exist naturally, or at least as complex compounds, or often sometimes from natural inorganic sources (such as calcium carbonate from ground oyster shells). Any of them are absorbed even more quickly in the ionic forms present in these sources. In the other hand, minerals are frequently artificially added to the diet as supplements; the most widely known is iodine in iodized salt, which inhibits goiter.

Vitamins

But for vitamin D, vitamins are important foods that are essential to a balanced diet. Vitamin D can be synthesized in the skin in the presence of UVB radiation. (Many animal species can synthesize vitamin C, but humans cannot.) Some vitamin-like compounds prescribed in the diet, such as carnitine, are considered useful for survival and wellbeing, but are not “essential” dietary nutrients since the human body has some capacity to manufacture them from other compounds. Vitamin deficiencies can lead to diseases such as goiter, scurvy, osteoporosis, compromised immune system, cell metabolism disorders, certain types of cancer, symptoms of premature aging, and poor mental health (including eating disorders), among others.

Common Human Nutritional Deficiencies

Even if you have plenty to eat, if you don’t eat a healthy diet, you can also be at risk for some dietary deficiencies. You may also have dietary shortages due to certain conditions of health or life, such as pregnancy, or certain drugs you may take, such as elevated blood pressure medications. People who have had intestinal disorders or have intestinal parts missing due to illness or weight loss surgery may also be at risk of vitamin deficiency. Alcoholics are also at high risk of dietary shortages. Vitamin D deficiency can affect the health of your bones, making it harder for you to absorb and use calcium (another mineral that you may not be getting enough of). While you can get vitamin D by being out in the sun, many people who have worries about skin cancer can end up with low levels of vitamin D by not having enough sun.

Iron deficiency anemia is one of the most common nutritional deficiencies. Your blood cells require iron to provide oxygen to your body, because if you don’t have enough iron, your blood won’t work properly. Some dietary deficits that can affect the blood cells include low levels of vitamin B12, folate, or vitamin C.

Other nutritional deficiencies include: