Balance Your Diet, Balance Your Health

Nutrition is the fuel that helps to keep your body at its best, giving you the ability to breathe, move, and think properly.

A balanced diet provides that essential nutrition to help you get the right balance of vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, carbohydrates, and other nutrients you need each day. Too much of one nutrient or too little of another and the balance is thrown off.

By understanding what nutrients make up a complete and balanced diet and why they’re important, you can help your body by eating properly and supplying it with the nutrients it needs.

Take a look at ChooseMyPlate.gov to see which foods contribute to a balanced diet:

MyPlate provides tips to help build healthier diets based on appropriate portion sizes of five food groups including fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy and protein.

Half of each plate should consist of fruits and vegetables. Most fruits and vegetables are naturally low in fat, sodium, and calories, and provide a rich array of many nutrients like potassium, dietary fiber, and vitamins C, A, and folic acid.

Make at least half of the grains you consume whole grains by eating whole grain cereals, breads, crackers, pasta, or rice every day. Whole grains provide dietary fiber, B vitamins, and minerals like iron and magnesium.

Get your calcium-rich foods from dairy products every day. MyPlate suggests switching to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk. Milk and some milk products are also fortified with vitamin D, which is essential for calcium absorption. If you don’t or can’t consume milk due to sensitivity to lactose, choose lactose-free products. Also, many non-dairy foods contain added calcium, including some breakfast cereals, bread, orange juice, and soy milk. Be sure to read the labels carefully to find the ones that are calcium-fortified. Dark green leafy vegetables are additional choices for calcium.

Protein is an important building block of muscle. You can get your daily intake of protein from meats, poultry, fish, eggs, dried beans and peas, nuts, and seeds. Beyond protein, these foods are an important source of iron, magnesium, zinc, and vitamin E.

But we all know how difficult it can be to eat balanced meals. Skip a vegetable at one meal, leave off a whole grain at another, and suddenly you could be lacking some of the key nutrients you need to meet your daily requirements.

Just one 8 fl oz bottle of BOOST^® Original Complete Nutritional Drink can help fill the nutritional gaps. With 26 essential vitamins, minerals, and other key nutrients, it’s easy to get back on the right track and maintain a complete and balanced diet.