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Eating a healthy, balanced diet is one of the most important things you can do to protect your health. Healthy eating basics In fact, up to 80% of premature heart disease and stroke can be prevented through your life choices and habits, such as eating a healthy diet and being physically active.
A healthy diet can help lower your risk of heart disease and stroke by:
improving your cholesterol levels
reducing your blood pressure
helping you manage your body weight
controlling your blood sugar.
What does a healthy, balanced diet look like?
Canada’s Food Guide recommends eating a variety of healthy foods each day. This includes eating plant-based foods more often and choosing highly-processed or ultra-processed foods less often.
Eating lots of vegetables and fruit.
This is one of the most important diet habits. Vegetables and fruit are packed with nutrients antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and fiber and help you maintain a healthy weight by keeping you full longer.
Fill half your plate with vegetables and fruit at every meal and snack.
Choosing whole grain foods
Whole grain foods include whole grain bread and crackers, brown or wild rice, quinoa, oatmeal, and hulled barley. They are prepared using the entire grain.
Whole grain foods have fiber, protein, and B vitamins to help you stay healthy and full longer.
Choose whole grain options instead of processed or refined grains like white bread and pasta.
Fill a quarter of your plate with whole grain foods.
Eating protein foods
Protein foods include legumes, nuts, seeds, tofu, fortified soy beverage, fish, shellfish, eggs, poultry, lean red meats including wild game, lower fat milk, lower fat yogurts, lower fat kefir, and cheeses lower in fat and sodium.
Eat protein every day.
Try to eat at least two servings of fish each week, and choose plant-based foods more often.
Dairy products are a great source of protein. Choose lower fat, unflavoured options.
Fill a quarter of your plate with protein foods.
Highly processed foods
often called ultra-processed foods that are changed from their original food source and have many added ingredients. During processing, often important nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, and fiber are removed while salt and sugar are added.
Examples of processed food include fast food, hot dogs, chips, cookies, frozen pizzas, deli meats, white rice, and white bread. Some minimally processed foods are okay.
These are foods that are slightly changed in some way but contain a few industrially made additives. Minimally processed foods keep almost all of their essential nutrients.
Some examples are bagged salad, frozen vegetables and fruit, eggs, milk, cheese, flour, brown rice, oil, and dried herbs. We are not referring to these minimally processed foods when we are advising you not to eat processed foods.
Heart & Stroke funded research found that ultra-processed foods make up almost half of Canadians' diets.
A healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition.
It protects you against many chronic non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Eating a variety of foods and consuming less salt, sugars, and saturated and industrially-produced trans-fats, are essential for a healthy diet.
A healthy diet comprises a combination of different foods. These include:
Staples like cereals wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rice or starchy tubers or roots potato, yam, taro, or cassava.
Legumes lentils and beans.
Fruit and vegetables.
Foods from animal sources meat, fish, eggs, and milk.
Here is some useful information, based on WHO recommendations, to follow a healthy diet, and the benefits of doing so.
Breastfeed babies and young children:
A healthy diet starts early in life - breastfeeding fosters healthy growth and may have longer-term health benefits, like reducing the risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing noncommunicable diseases later in life.
Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from birth to 6 months of life is important for a healthy diet. It is also important to introduce a variety of safe and nutritious complementary foods at 6 months of age while continuing to breastfeed until your child is two years old and beyond.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit:
They are important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, plant protein, and antioxidants.
People with diets rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain types of cancer.
Eat less fat:
Fats and oils and concentrated sources of energy. Eating too much, particularly the wrong kinds of fat, like saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Using unsaturated vegetable oils olive, soy, sunflower, or corn oil rather than animal fats or oils high in saturated fats butter, ghee, lard, coconut, and palm oil will help consume healthier fats.
To avoid unhealthy weight gain, consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person's overall energy intake.
Limit intake of sugars:
For a healthy diet, sugars should represent less than 10% of your total energy intake. Reducing even further to under 5% has additional health benefits.
Choosing fresh fruits instead of sweet snacks such as cookies, cakes, and chocolate helps reduce the consumption of sugars.
Limiting the intake of soft drinks, soda, and other drinks high in sugars fruit juices, cordials and syrups, flavored milk, and yogurt drinks also, help reduce the intake of sugars.
Reduce salt intake:
Keeping your salt intake to less than 5h per day helps prevent hypertension and reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke in the adult population.
Limiting the amount of salt and high-sodium condiments soy sauce and fish sauce when cooking and preparing foods helps reduce salt intake.
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