(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-16 07:40

We must eat to live. But not many of us know how to eat in a manner to live a healthy life.

The latest guides for balanced food intake published by the Ministry of Health yesterday should function as an important reference for both gourmands and gourmets.

Despite the improved living conditions of Chinese people in the past three decades, we still face the challenge of two extremes - too much nutrition for well-off residents and undernourishment for the poverty-stricken.

The rapidly increasing number of patients suffering from chronic diseases because of unhealthy diets suggest that teaching the well-off to have balanced diets is as important as poverty alleviation to help the disadvantaged to have enough to eat.

The new version of balanced diet composition based on its old version published in 1997 aims to tell residents how to arrange their daily diets to keep them healthy and away from such chronic diseases as cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, obesity and hypertension.

Such a diet composition, known as a diet pyramid with basic grain food at the bottom and edible oil and salt at the top, as reference, if carefully consulted, will be able to overcome some bias or preference we persistently harbor against and for certain foods.

Some who have experienced the hard times when meat and refined food was a rarity tend to prefer refined good grains to coarse food grains and quite a number of young people growing up with fast food are particular fond of junk food regardless of its harm to their health.

Even for those who are concerned about a healthy diet, too much preference for a particular kind of nutrition leads to an unbalance and is likely to cause health problems.

Apart from the balanced diet pyramid, the guides also provide reference for special groups such as babies, pregnant women, aged people and children to have a diet that is good to their health.

What is noteworthy is the suggestion these guides provide for residents to develop a healthy lifestyle. For example, the guides not only tell how much water a person usually has to drink, it also suggests that we should sip the water we need bit by bit to take it proportionally. The guides also tell of the amount of physical exercise we need to do everyday to keep fit.

It is good that the ministry will launch campaigns to give publicity to the guides to make more people aware of how to plan our menus.

(China Daily 01/16/2008 page8)