P1 Explain Concepts Associated with Nutritional Health

P1: A person’s diet is the food they regularly consume, for example a high fibre diet contains a lot of fruit and vegetables. A nutrient is anything that nourishes a human or animal for example iron is a nutrient if someone is a vegetarian they don’t get a lot of iron so they have to take iron supplement tablets. A meal is a fairly large portion of food that is served and eaten for example a roast dinner which contains vegetables, meat and potatoes. A snack is a small amount of food eaten in between meals for example a sandwich. Malnutrition is caused by people having to many or too little nutrients, this can cause poor wound healing, fatigue and organ failure. Over nutrition is where you take in too many nutrients, this affects energy balance and leads to obesity. It also affects health, for example high intakes of salt are linked to high blood pressure. Under nutrition means not getting enough nutrients and can lead to starvation, mirasmus and kwashikor. All of these conditions can lead to low self esteem, depression, anxiety and in many cases anger problems. Body Mass Index (BMI) is used as a guide to a person’s weight. It is calculated by dividing the person’s weight in kilograms by their height in metres then dividing the answer by their height in metres again. This is the system they use to determine whether someone is underweight ideal or overweight.
This is a table to show how BMI is used as a guide to health: BMI | Comment | Less than 18.5 | Underweight | 18.5 – 24.9 | Ideal | 25 – 29.9 | Overweight | 30 – 40 | Obese | More than 40 | Severely obese |

Food labels give you all of the nutritional information about the food in question, they also tell the percentages of what things are in the food. Ingredients are another thing that are found on food labels, they sometimes tell you how much of a certain food is in the product. Food labels also contain portion sizes so you know how much a recommended portion size is so you are not over