What Are Your Nutritional Needs?
What
Are Your Nutritional Needs?
Nutrition as it applies to our
daily lives means that we take in what we need to maintain our body’s healthy
state. Nutrition has become an important
word thanks to the involvement of the USDA in our daily food requirements, and
the FDA’s involvement in determining what is and is not dangerous for us to
consume.
But what is
our responsibility in the nutrition game?
Do we understand what our nutritional requirements are, how to fulfill
those requirements, and how to look for real nutritional value in our
foods? I’m not sure that nutrition has
been successfully addressed in its own right.
We hear nutrition in relation to our vitamin intake, our fortified
cereals and milk, and in the context that we need “nutritional value” from our
food choices. But what really is
nutrition when applied to our daily bodily functions?
Today, we must determine how much
nourishment we need, how much physical exercise we need, and how best to
accomplish those ends. Calorie needs,
nutritional needs, physical needs, and education about those needs now is
information we should all understand, at least as it applies to our individual
self. If you will visit your local
doctor, library, or fitness center, there is massive amounts of information available
to help educate and to help you make good health choices, no matter what the
age group.
Nutrition
refers to the nurturing of our body, in our ability to keep it healthy and
functioning as it is supposed to do. Our
ability to provide the body with all the necessary food, vitamins, and minerals
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 what our individual needs are, 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.
Quite
often, our vitamin and mineral needs outweigh our caloric needs. In those instances, we turn to manufactured
vitamins and minerals to fill the gap.
This is a part of our nutritional needs, also.
Nutrition is one of the most
complex areas to gain useful knowledge about, because there are so many
components, and because each person has their own individual needs. Women needs differ from those of men, and
older women’s needs differ from those of a young girl. As we age, our needs constantly change;
therefore continual education about nutrition is a fact of life.
The
nutritional needs of a cardiac patient are different than those of a healthy,
middle-aged hiker. Can you see the
complexity of the situation now? What we
really need is to develop a scale that determines the nutritional needs of our
bodies on a cellular level, so that as we age, as our physical condition
changes, or our health changes, we can recalculate our needs, based on cellular
changes and content in our body.
Individuality is the key to understanding each person’s nutritional
needs, and then working to educate ourselves is the key to fulfilling those
nutritional needs. Good nutrition should
be the ultimate goal of every person alive.