The diet is made up of eating habits.
A diet is the set of food substances that make up the nutritional behavior of living beings. The concept comes from the Greek word díaita , which means "way of life." Diet, therefore, is a habit and constitutes a way of life.
The term is sometimes used to refer to special diets for weight loss or to combat certain diseases , although these cases represent modifications to the diet and not the diet itself.
Types of diet
According to the diet they follow, living beings can be classified in various ways: carnivores (they eat meat), detritivores (they feed on dead organic substances), herbivores (they eat plants and fruits), insectivores (insects), omnivores (their system can digest meat and vegetables) or cannibals (they eat members of the same species), among others. Human beings are omnivorous by nature, although for ideological or religious reasons many choose to be vegetarians (they abstain from meat and fish).
Veganism , also known as strict vegetarianism , excludes from the diet any food product of animal origin. More precisely, any food whose preparation requires the torture and murder of an animal. For this reason, it does not allow meat of any kind, eggs or milk, but only plant products.
While many critics of this lifestyle claim that vegans are not getting adequate nutrition, veganism has been around for a long time, and actual statistics indicate that abstaining from animal products in the diet significantly reduces the risk of various types of cancer and other diseases of varying severity.
Certain foods make a diet unhealthy.
Cultural, social and economic influence on nutrition
Human nutrition is not determined solely by biological factors, but is also influenced by social , economic and cultural factors. Diet is often determined by the availability of food, which depends on climatic conditions and the geographical location of each region.
Personal factors that determine a diet cannot be forgotten, such as taste, the influence of advertising for certain food products, aesthetic preferences and other issues.
The ease of obtaining certain foods, climatic conditions and social customs mean that each country and region has its own diet. Argentina , for example, has one of the highest rates of beef consumption in the world. The United States , on the other hand, is characterized by the consumption of junk food , that is, foods with little nutritional value and high levels of fat or sugar, such as hamburgers. This diet has caused an obesity epidemic in the American population.
All this shows us that the importance of diet is too great to cover only the nutritional aspect of our lives . Each culture, each community feels identified not only with a series of customs, festivals and one or more languages, but also with its typical dishes, those whose recipes are passed down from generation to generation and which seem unable to be reproduced with the same "magic" in other regions.
Returning to the case of veganism, although the first feature that comes to mind is that it does not allow the consumption of animal products in its diet, it is about much more than that: it is a compassionate way of sharing the planet with the rest of living beings . Giraffes cannot hunt, and that is why they tear fresh leaves from trees with their teeth; we cannot hunt without weapons either, and that is why we should limit ourselves to agriculture .
Growing our own food or raising caged animals and then killing them for food says a lot about us. We should adopt a diet that is in line with our principles , that makes us proud of our choices.