Why is health & good nutrition important?
Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle. Combined with physical activity and good social health, your diet can help you to reach and maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle that will reduce your risk of sickness and diseases and positively impact your lives.
Your bodies needs the right fuel for the ability to do things which requires healthy diet, physical activity and good mental health. A healthy diet consists of nutritious foods and is extremely important as it contributes to having a healthy lifestyle. Recent research shows that nourishing food not only makes a teenager healthier, it makes them emotionally more stable, and it improves school performance.
Your bodies needs the right fuel for the ability to do things which requires healthy diet, physical activity and good mental health. A healthy diet consists of nutritious foods and is extremely important as it contributes to having a healthy lifestyle. Recent research shows that nourishing food not only makes a teenager healthier, it makes them emotionally more stable, and it improves school performance.
What is poor nutrition?
Poor nutrition is habits that negatively influence your health including how you feel, look, think and act. Poor nutrition can greatly affect teenagers specifically as nutrition is critical in the growth of teenagers as they are still developing, therefore poor nutrition can put teenagers at a higher risk of sickness and diseases. Poor nutrition is putting teenagers's bodies at risk due to their bad nutritional practices or habits, and is developed through influences and their perspective to how eating healthy can impact their lives.
Examples of poor nutrition
Risks teenagers take that cause poor nutrition includes not eating enough healthy foods, unbalanced diet, low intake of fibre or intake of high in fat, salt or sugar, skipping meals during the day, large amounts of unhealthy foods, eating multiple fast food options, consuming sugary drinks such as soft drink or sports drinks, not enough consumption of vegetables, fruits or fresh produce.
Influences of poor nutrition
Family
Family starts and develops a child’s eating diet and habits as they grow up, therefore if the family or parents get the child into bad eating habits of unhealthy foods, it can carries on and develops poor nutrition. For example, if a child’s parents feeds them unhealthy fast foods frequently, the child then thinks it is ok to continue these eating habits, causing poor nutrition.
Culture and beliefs
Culture can also be another influence as eating habits can originate from traditions or cultures that take part of someone’s life. If these traditions consist of bad eating habits or daily eating routines it can affect the child greatly.
Media
Images through magazines, television, social media and advertisement can communicate perfection seeking. Celebrities and media play a huge role in influencing poor nutrition as teenagers see these ‘perfect women’ seemed to be skinny, pretty, and beautiful. This typical teenage perspective can change their view on nutrition that they have to be skinnier. This leads to eating disorder behaviours and could create eating disorders or even anorexia.
Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is a huge influence to teenager nowadays. People considered as 'popular' and 'cool', negatively influence how teenagers compare themselves to others. Words used by peers like ugly, fat, or overweight can contribute and pressure teenagers to be skinnier to be more popular which could potentially lead to anorexia from starving themselves for the desire to be socially prettier or even mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
Family starts and develops a child’s eating diet and habits as they grow up, therefore if the family or parents get the child into bad eating habits of unhealthy foods, it can carries on and develops poor nutrition. For example, if a child’s parents feeds them unhealthy fast foods frequently, the child then thinks it is ok to continue these eating habits, causing poor nutrition.
Culture and beliefs
Culture can also be another influence as eating habits can originate from traditions or cultures that take part of someone’s life. If these traditions consist of bad eating habits or daily eating routines it can affect the child greatly.
Media
Images through magazines, television, social media and advertisement can communicate perfection seeking. Celebrities and media play a huge role in influencing poor nutrition as teenagers see these ‘perfect women’ seemed to be skinny, pretty, and beautiful. This typical teenage perspective can change their view on nutrition that they have to be skinnier. This leads to eating disorder behaviours and could create eating disorders or even anorexia.
Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is a huge influence to teenager nowadays. People considered as 'popular' and 'cool', negatively influence how teenagers compare themselves to others. Words used by peers like ugly, fat, or overweight can contribute and pressure teenagers to be skinnier to be more popular which could potentially lead to anorexia from starving themselves for the desire to be socially prettier or even mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
Teenage perspective of nutrition
Unhealthy eating and poor nutrition is largely caused by bad eating habits. Teenager’s perspective of nutrition includes not caring about what they eat as they are not aware of the consequences it could lead to in the future. For examples teenagers might think eating a bag of potato chips while watching TV once in a while or eating food during a party will probably not cause them any harm. However, when these actions become repetitive, they develop into habits. Which could lead to serious harm in the future such as diseases, obesity and sickness.