High quality diets are good for the health. In particular high quality diets, based on traditional eating practices have been shown to reduce the risk of Wester lifestyle diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes. High quality diets are composed of unrefined unprocessed foods that contain high amounts of fibre and micronutrients, as well as good quality bioavailable protein, plus the two essential fatty acids in the correct ratios. High quality nutrition can be incredibly tasty once the addiction of high sugar and high fat processed foods are overcome. Therefore maintaining a high quality diet is not difficult is a little effort is made to ensure the food is well prepared. However, there are occasions where it is not alway possible to eat as you would wish, and in certain circumstances some food is better than no food, even if it is of lower quality. Cheating on a high quality eating programme does therefore happen, and even the strictest diet plan may deviate from its correct course from time to time for various reasons.
Low quality foods cause metabolic dysfunction because they tend to overload the liver with energy. In addition, they are devoid of meaningful levels of micronutrients. Consuming a high quality multivitamin and mineral can ensure that the latter of these two characteristics does not lead to poor health, as long as the poor quality foods are only eaten infrequently. However the former of the two characteristics is more difficulties to counteract. Energy overload is detrimental to the liver because it causes the de novo lipogenesis pathway to upregulate and this produces high amounts of fatty acids that can cause insulin resistance. Exercise is effective at inhibiting the de novo lipogenesis pathways because it depletes the liver of glycogen and this causes the excess energy from the poor quality foods to be stored as liver glycogen. Exercise can therefore counteract the effects of a poor quality diet, although its effects on weight loss are more controversial. Of course the best way to maintain health is to eat high quality foods all the time.
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