What is the Definition of Diet?

What is diet? Diet explained in layman terms.
Diet in plain terms is anything we eat to live from day to day. Humans are omnivore, meaning our diets come from plant and animal food sources. Some people are vegetarian and live on vegetable and fruits only.

WordNet Dictionary of Princeton University defines diet as:

  • The usual food and drink consumed by an organism (person or animal)
  • A prescribed selection of foods.

Notice that anything you drink is considered into account, so water, milk, apple juice, beer, vodka, cocktail, cokes, etc is part of your diet too.

By looking at your diet, an expert can predict how long you will live. In fact, you don’t even have to be an expert to do this. Think; how long someone will live if his or her diet consists mostly of beer, whiskey, fatty foods, and ice cream? Of course we’re talking about adults diet here, not kids.

Diet Problems
Bad diets bring many problems. An unhealthy diet is an inclination to several major diseases. High fat diet may cause physical problems like coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. Psychologically it may cause a severe low self-esteem. Low protein diet may results in undernourishment and depressed immune system, anemia, and kwashiorkor (a form of protein energy malnutrition) in children.

Dietary Supplement
People nowadays are busier than before. Sometimes it’s not very practical to consume all the nutrients needed for proper functioning of the body from the food alone. Therefore many people try to supplement the need of nutrition by taking supplement pills. People who eat less because of their diet are strongly recommended to take supplements.

Another role of supplement pills is helping people to lose weight. This supplement is usually called as diet pills. Some diet pills induce anorexia and help you reduce the number of times you eat as well as the amount of food a day. You must be careful in selecting this kind of supplements. A thorough research is a good precaution as there are too many dietary pills that don’t deliver what they promise.

Dieting is important for a healthy living. People need to be in one form of a diet or another, whether it is because of an illness, or perhaps because they want to loss weight or maintain their ideal weight. Most importantly, before any decision you will make to take on any kind of diet, you must ask your doctors advice first, always.

All kind of diets only works if we commit on it and stick on it; making it as a life style if we can. Diet affects our health greatly; therefore we must pay a good attention to it and always do our best to avoid bad diets.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 12:29 am and is filed under Weight Loss Tips & Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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