Healthy eating means consuming food adequate in essential nutrients, energy, dietary fibers and all other nutrients that body needs and helps to prevent disease. If our diet lacks certain nutrients it can cause undernutrition. For instance, if an individual diet consists of only rice and meat, no vegetables and dairy products. It means that diet has lack of adequate vitamins and minerals leading to undernutrition or malnutrition. Thus body start showing deficiency symptoms leading to major chronic disease. Healthy eating means eating balanced diet, it doesn't mean that eating too much of any one type of food.
A balanced diet which includes all kind of foods like vegetables, grains, dairy products, fruits, meat and water. The balanced diet prevents both overnutrition and undernutrition.
Consume Variety Of Food
Consuming variety of food will improve the quality of diet because with more food choices helps to gain adequate essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals and other energy. Remember that no single food or food group contains everything that your body needs. For example, in case of fruits if you eat only banana and avoid other fruits then although your diet would include rich source of potassium but very little vitamins and other minerals. Hence your diet must include all food in moderate amount. Eating too much of fatty and fried food result in weight gain however the small or moderate quanity of such food is important for the growth of the body.
Consume Nutrient Dense Foods
Healthy eating includes choosing food that are nutrient dense. Nutrient dense food means the food that are high in nutrientslike vitamins and minerals, but low in energy (kilocalories). For example, fresh fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins, minerals and fiber which usually provides less kilocalories. Nutrient dense foods are also low in fats and low in added sugar. Some foods like nuts, almonds, milk and yogurt are high in fats, vitamins and minerals and are also considered as 'Nutrient Dense Foods'.
Consume Low-Energy Dense Foods
Foods that are high in energy but low in nutreints like vitamins and minerals are Energy Dense Foods. Mostly high fatty food are considered as energy dense food. People who prefer low energy dense food will generally have low fat and high nutrient content food. Low- Energy Dense food can help in weight loss because eating larger volume of low-energy dense foods improves the satiety and decreases the hunger.