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What Is A Balanced Meal?

© Jill Manzoni

What is a balanced diet? Does it simply fall into the basic four food groups of milk, meat, fruit-vegetables, and grain? For over 40 years these have been the approved FDA standard. Their idea of eating correctly, and the adage of “We are what we eat”, so if we eat just these will we be healthy?

If this is the case, and we are all eating balanced diets, why are there so many sick people? Why so many full hospitals? Why are there 2000 people a day dying of cancer? And even a million people per year suffering and dying from heart disease?

Let us look at the long list, which we are dealing with. Diabetes, mental illness, kidney and liver disease, multitudes of people who are sterile, birth defects, hyperactive children, colds, ulcers, viruses, chronically fatigued, and this is only a partial list! If eating a variety of foods in the four groups is the answer, then why are we spending almost as much on sickness as we are on the foods that keep us alive? For our medical bills have reached a point where they are threatening to equal or surpass our $200 billion grocery bills!

The U. S. Department of Agriculture says, "It is no longer enough merely to recommend a regular diet from the four basic groups. People today are getting a lot of questionable information about foods through advertising, and this has produced a nation malnourished in a new way, by being overweight." In a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Joan Dye Gussow, president of the Society for Nutrition Education as well as chairman of nutrition education at Columbia, pointed out, “One reason we and the food industry have lived so long and happily together with the four food groups is that it is a vague enough classification to be able to tolerate all kinds of food horrors. Purple breakfast confections with magenta marshmallows are taken in as part of the grain-cereal group, for example, and Hi-C Dairy Fresh Red Punch containing little or no fruit can masquerade as part of the fruit and vegetable group. The Basic Four, in short, turns out to be totally undiscriminating in a world of fantasy foods so no one's gets ignored."

Good health does depend on a varied diet. The amazing variety in our supermarkets makes us the envy of the world. But the simple truth is the diet is bad, no matter how varied, if the food itself is bad. And the food is bad if it lacks the essential vitamins and minerals or if it contains chemical poisons.