• Question: What is the healthiest food?

    Asked by kamilo12 to clairemarieroberts, Faye, Martin, Mus, Pete on 23 Apr 2012.
    • Photo: Pete Etchells

      Pete Etchells answered on 23 Apr 2012:

      This isn’t really my area of expertise, so someone else may want to correct me! I don’t think that there’s one particular food that is healthier than everything else. There are lots of generally healthy food though, and the best thing you can do is to have a balanced diet that includes lots of different types of food, rather than one single type. so that means eating a wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrain foods, and lean meats.

      The NHS has a really good website where you can find out more information about how to eat healthily: http://www.nhs.uk/LiveWell/Goodfood/Pages/Goodfoodhome.aspx

      Hope that answers your question!

    • Photo: clairemarieroberts

      clairemarieroberts answered on 23 Apr 2012:

      There is no one food that is the ‘healthiest’. That’s because as humans we need to eat a combination of food to ensure we are getting the right levels of vitamins, minerals and can generate energy to stay alive and perform our daily activities.

      There are some foods that have lots of nutrients needed for good health. There is a concept called ‘nutrient density’ that is used to indicate which foods have the highest nutritional value.

      Nutrient density is a measure of the amount of nutrients a food contains in comparison to the number of calories. A food is more nutrient dense when the level of nutrients is high in relationship to the number of calories the food contains.

      As you would probably expect, foods with high nutrient density are vegetables like asparagus, carrots, spinach and tomatoes. Fruit like apricots, blueberries, strawberries and pineapple. Eggs, yoghurt, fish (e.g., cod & salmon), lean meat, nuts and seeds and surprisingly, herbs and spices are also nutrient dense (e.g., ginger, chillies and mint).

Comments