Almost everyone is aware today of the importance of protein in our diet. Protein directly affects our muscles, tissues and organs, and brain. What happens if we don’t get the necessary protein or any of the other many nutrients our body, not just our brain, needs to function correctly? Through our minds, we can absorb the necessary facts and figures and process them into useable pieces of information.
Nutrition refers to nurturing our body in our ability to keep it healthy and functioning as it is supposed to. Our ability to provide the body with all the necessary vitamins and minerals through food so that we continue to thrive in our daily life processes.
How do we determine that we are providing the essential nutritional needs?
That knowledge comes by educating ourselves about our individual needs and the needs of our family, and then taking that knowledge and applying it to the foods we buy, that we prepare, and that our families consume. Once again, through our minds, we can take the guidance provided by the USDA, develop a journal and establish our daily requirements to take care of our necessary nutritional needs.
According to the guides published by the USDA, calorie needs vary from one age group to another, one gender to another. So how do you determine what your individual needs are? You can set up a journal for recording your daily caloric intake for about a month. Make a note of your weight each day. If you don’t gain weight during that month, you’re eating your recommended calorie level to maintain weight. Now, take that calorie information, and check with a nutritionist about the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals you need. Take both information, calorie intake, and nutritional requirements. Use the food pyramid and comprise a combination of foods that will help you achieve these recommended daily intakes and still be enjoyable food. You now have an individualized healthy eating plan.
Throughout absorbing the instructions for a healthy, well-balanced eating plan, we have used our minds throughout the process. Our ability to think and reason, our level of education, and the exposure we receive to outside input daily affect our entire environment, especially our health. We make choices based on the information we have previously absorbed.
Our food, exercise, and recreation choices are no exception, and it just so happens that these choices can immediately affect our health.
Maybe now you have a clearer picture of the opportunities we have for our brain to affect our health. It is more than just conscious decisions; it results from brain development through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It results from the information we have previously absorbed and the input we will continue to receive.