If you’re like me, you first heard about nutrition in school, and thought, “boring.” All the dietary facts and statistics are like dates and events in History class. Once we start learning why the events happened, history becomes interesting and relevant to us now. When we learn why it’s important for our current and future lives, good nutrition goes from boring to interesting and essential. Forget the boring details, this article is all about how to keep from having a weak and tired, mentally slow, impoverished, diseased, short life…now you’re interested!
Forget Nutritional Values: Most health articles are all about how much of this you should have or that to avoid…what is good and what is bad. You can find that anywhere. Until you know why that stuff is important, none of it matters. It just sounds like someone lecturing you on how to live. I don’t know about you, but I’m too busy living to want to spend much time being preached at. People preached at me for years about smoking being bad for me, but until I experienced what it was actually doing to me, I wasn’t interested in quitting. Once I knew why to quit, how to quit was easy. Once you know why to have good nutrition, how to do it will be easy, too.
Nutrition And Energy Now: Stop drinking liquids for 2 days and tell me how you feel. Tired? Go 3 days and you’ll be dead. Water is essential. Every nutrient works the same as water on a slower scale. The worse your nutrition is, the less energy you will have to live your life. When we’re young, we can usually go a long while before we crash, but the crash is certain if we don’t have a balanced, healthy diet. When we’re older, we can feel the crash coming…trust me. The first thing nutrition does for you is give you energy for the physical activities of life, today.
Nutrition And Mental Ability: It isn’t just for physical activities. How fast you learn and whether you can work through thinking problems all depend on good nutrition. Deficiencies in some cases can actually cause you to have the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease, or Schizophrenia, for example. By maintaining good nutrition, you can improve your ability to learn and process information. Tests of students at all age levels have confirmed this. Mental ability has to do with more than learning facts and solving problems, though. Social success depends on picking up and understanding subtle clues. Often, people are considered slow because poor nutrition causes them to miss those clues and react inappropriately. If you’ve ever been laughed at by your peers, it’s possible a good diet can help prevent that.
Nutrition And Income: Energy, mental ability, education and social skills all combine to determine how we do in the business world. Since all of these things can be improved, the relationship is obvious between good nutrition and how much money or satisfaction you have, professionally. One executive put it this way, “It isn’t that people are angry, uncooperative and don’t want to work, it’s just that they’re ill due to their poor nutrition choices.” Diet changes your emotions; how you see things, how you react to things, what you feel. It’s no accident that some executive interviews occur over a meal. Employers know that people who follow good nutritional habits are better, more productive, more cooperative, healthier employees.
Nutrition And Disease: It’s probably very obvious to most people that poor diet and disease are related. Many major diseases, like heart disease and diabetes, have been linked to nutrients for most of our lives. What isn’t as obvious is the link between good nutrition in general and almost every disease, from the common cold and flu, to cancer. Good, balanced nutrients give your body what it needs to fight off minor colds and the terrible, frightening, crippling and life-threatening diseases. Even if you have a genetic pre-disposition toward certain diseases, good nutrition can reduce the risk of actually getting most of them. Daily, scientists are finding more and more evidence of the importance of diet in fighting, preventing and curing diseases.
Nutrition And Long, Quality Life: I guess it’s obvious if the above is true, your life will be longer. Many studies over the past 6 decades have confirmed a strong relationship between nutrition and longevity. They’ve also found that the quality of life is greatly enhanced.
Why is nutrition important? Because you can have more energy, more mental ability, more money, less disease and more life by simply making sure you have a good, balanced intake of nutrients. Now that you know why, here’s a resource for information on the what and how of good nutrition. Knowing why it’s important will help you navigate the sea of information on vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, antioxidants and everything else that’s out there. Enjoy!
