Healthy Lifestyles

Food is essential for our survival. It gives us the vital fuel for building our bodies and helps us to perform our daily functions. In many ways, it is life itself.

Beyond the basic survival instinct and the satisfaction of hunger, the need to feed our bodies should be a pleasure. Tastes, textures and combinations can either delight us or put us off food. So well-prepared, nourishing and tasty food can give us a tremendous feeling of wellbeing.

In South Africa we have a variety of food to choose from – and all it takes is time to consider what we eat. How we use this choice determines our wellbeing. It is true that “you are what you eat”. The joy we feel in our daily lives, the comfort we feel with ourselves, our weight and our own bodies, depends on the type of food we eat and how much of it we consume. Nutrition makes us what we are.

How we eat is also important. Meals bring us other benefits beyond energy and personal wellbeing. They have a social role, which we teach our children at an early age, and allow us to share with each other. They reinforce the ties between family, friends and colleagues, adding an extra dimension to our feeling of wellbeing.

However, like the family unit itself, the structured meal is changing all across the world. Many of us now eat together less frequently. With busy lives, more job opportunities, independent teenagers and different interests, food habits are changing. We are eating more individually and more on the go; and we are eating snacks and more processed foods with high fat and sugar content. This imbalance in our diet means our nutrition suffers - and our wellbeing.

For more information on healthy eating, click here.