Healthy Eating

A healthy eating pattern is vital to good health and well being. Just like physical activity, healthy eating benefits almost every aspect of your health throughout your lifetime. It is the eating habits you choose everyday that count.

Healthy eating patterns can help to protect us against:

heart disease
type 2 diabetes
some cancers
other chronic diseases
premature death.

It also helps to increase resilience, quality of life and resistance to infection and to provide good physical and mental health throughout life. Good nutrition is especially important for normal growth and cognitive development in infants and children.

Our busy modern lifestyles have led us to rely more on convenience foods which are not always healthy. Combine this with limited physical activity and our health can start to suffer.

To help provide advice in addressing increasing levels of obesity and lifestyle-related health problems, the National Health and Medical Research Council has released Food for health - Dietary Guidelines.

There are guidelines for:

adults (pdf file - large file warning), and
children and adolescents (pdf file - large file warning)

There are 4 simple guidelines to follow:

1. Enjoy a wide variety of nutritious foods and drink plenty of water.

2. Prevent weight gain: be physically active and eat according to your energy needs.

3. Care for your food: prepare and store it safely.

4. Encourage and support breastfeeding.

Children, young people and adults have different nutritional needs so check out the different healthy eating tips for each group. And don't forget to try the yummy recipes.