Why is nutrition important?
Find out why it's the key to good health!

Why is nutrition important? Well, nutrition is important if you want a fit and healthy body that does what you want it to do. In fact, if you want physical energy and vitality, nutrition is essential because the right nutrition gives your body the material it requires to produce a healthy, energetic body.

Let's start with the definition of nutrition. Being able to answer the question, "why is nutrition important" yourself depends on your own understanding of nutrition.

The definition of nutrition is "the act of being nourished; especially, the processes of taking in and assimilating food for promoting growth and replacing worn or injured tissue." In other words, nutrition is the action of eating and drinking things that nourish the body that make it possible for the body to grow, repair itself and create energy.

Example: "His poor nutrition led to his illness." The word "nutrition" can also refer to anything that nourishes, such as in "Apples provide good nutrition."

Understanding nutrition

The reason and purpose for nutrition is quite simple:

• You have a body.
• The body needs certain basic things in order to function properly.
• The most fundamental requirement of the body is to be nourished.

To nourish means "to feed or sustain with substances necessary to life and growth." Good nutrition provides the body with substances necessary to life and growth!

Relationship of food to nutrition

So what is the relationship of food to nutrition? Understanding the difference between food and nutrition and how it affects your health will answer the question "Why is nutrition important?"

Food and nutrition are not the same thing. Food has varying degrees of nutrition - either a lot of good nutrition (sometimes called "superfood") all the way down to little to no nutritional value (sometimes called "junk food").

For example, an apple has much more ability to nourish the body (nutritional value) than a doughnut. They're both things we eat and called "food" - but the apple breaks down during digestion into substances that the body says, "Ooooooh, I need that!" With the doughnut, the body says "Hmmmm, can't use much of this stuff, throw it away or store it somewhere, like in the butt cheeks!"

In summary, the answer to "why is nutrition important?" is because your body won't work right without the right kind of nutrition. And the various foods we consume have different levels of nutrition. Some food has a lot of good nutrition and some food has pretty much no nutrition.

Nutrition is what makes your body work the way it should. The article on healthy eating guidelines will give you one key factor in determining and choosing food with more (or less) nutritional value.

For easy-to-understand information on exactly what things the body needs as far as proper nutrition, check out the article "The Nutrition of Foods." And all the articles in this section, Food, Nutrition and Health will increase your understanding of nutrition so you will be able to answer the question when someone asks you, "why is nutrition important?"

Cheers!

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