Benefits of a Healthy Diet

A healthy diet is a balanced diet which includes foods from all the food groups like plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole cereals, grains and their products, skimmed milk and skimmed milk products. A healthy diet will help you to keep your BMI in an ideal range or just help you to remain in the ideal body weight slot. Choose the foods wisely for a diet to be healthy for instance chose whole grains and cereals instead of going for refined foods or processed foods simply because whole foods will provide complex carbohydrates, and they are a good source of fiber and B-complex vitamins. Include a variety of fresh fruits, green leafy and other vegetables as they are a very good source of various vitamins and minerals and also provide considerable amount of fiber. Minimum amount of calories should come from sugars. Healthy diet should be low in trans fat, saturated fat and cholesterol, other sources of fat like monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils, fish and nuts can comprise up to 20-25% of the total calories. Another important factor in a healthy diet is serving size, a serving size of a food item can be far smaller than you actually consume. So this is an important factor to keep in mind to count calories. A healthy diet will simply help you to remain healthy and disease free if it is followed for life time.