Diet

sum of food consumed by an organism

Diet is defined as the usual food and drink of an organism. It can also mean a regulated selection of foods, as for medical reasons or cosmetic weight loss.

Quotes

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  • Because of their remote location, the Fiji islands did not access to television until 1995, when a single station was introduced. It broadcasts programs from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Until that time, Fiji had no reported cases of eating disorders, and a study conducted by anthropologist Anne Becker showed that most Fijian girls and women, no matter how large, were comfortable with their bodies. In 1998, just three years after the station began broadcasting, 11 percent of girls reported vomiting to control weight, and 62 percent of girls surveyed reported dieting during the previous months.
  • Many medical professionals, too, were trapped in what I’d call the “anorexic paradigm.” They hadn’t yet understood that eating problems take many different forms and inhabit bodies of many different sizes and shapes. Binge eating-a chronic problem among many African American women-is no less a disordered relation to food than habitual purging, and large women who don’t or won’t diet are not necessarily comfortable with their bodies.
  • Obesity and diabetes are the two major metabolic complications linked with bad eating habits and the sedentary (lazy) lifestyle. In the worst-case situation, metabolic problems are a causative factor for numerous other conditions. There is also an increased demand to control the emergence of such diseases. Dietary and lifestyle improvements contribute to their leadership at an elevated level. The present review, therefore, recommends the use of the ketogenic diet (KD) in obesity and diabetes treatment. The KD involves a diet that replaces glucose sugar with ketone bodies and is effective in numerous diseases, such as metabolic disorders, epileptic seizures, autosomal dominant polycystic disease of the kidney, cancers, peripheral neuropathy, and skeletal muscle atrophy.
    • Sachin Kumar, Tapan Behl, Monika Sachdeva, Aayush Sehgal, Shilpa Kumari, Arun Kumar, Gagandeep Kaur, Harlokesh Narayan Yadav, and Simona Bungau, (2021). "Implicating the effect of ketogenic diet as a preventive measure to obesity and diabetes mellitus". Life Sciences 264. DOI:10.1016/j.lfs.2020.118661.
  • A new study of Marquette University freshmen who had been randomly assigned to rooms found that women with heavier roommates actually gained less weight on average than those with thinner roommates — a half-pound versus two and a half pounds.
    The reason? Four of five overweight roommates were dieting and exercising, and those habits often rubbed off on a roommate, regardless of her size, says Olga Yakusheva, an assistant professor in economics at Marquette and a co-author of the study. Even thin women were weight watching, Dr. Yakusheva says, pointing to cultural pressures.
    Margo D. Maine, a psychologist and specialist in eating disorders, warns that young women age 17 to 19 are at risk of developing some form of eating disorder, and some may be particularly susceptible to a calorie-counting roommate. Why one student wields more influence over another isn’t always clear. But when students first arrive on campus, some may lose confidence, Dr. Maine suggests, and follow the lead of a more self-assured roommate.
  • The earliest documented examples of micronutrients’ influencing immunity date from the nineteenth century. Such work indicated previously unappreciated links with immunity and made a strong case that infections did not cause observed disorders and pathologies but were secondary to deficiency in micronutrients. Supported by clinical and epidemiological studies, which show a substantial negative correlation of nutritional deficiencies with immunocompetence and the reverse correlation with the risk of infection and related pathologies, is the idea that nutrition is an important determinant of immunity is now generally well accepted (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, the impact of dietary elements in immune system–related processes is still often dismissed, even when substantial amounts of data correlate diet with immune system–related related disorders.
  • There is an emergent interest in understanding how the ‘Western diet’ affects immunity. Many people across the globe have adopted this diet, and epidemiological studies have revealed that it correlates with a high incidence of chronic inflammatory disorders, including diabetes, multiple sclerosis and asthma. Nevertheless, because the Western diet includes a large proportion of red meat, sugars, fats and refined carbohydrates and relatively small amounts of vegetables, fruits and fish, it is likely that the causative component of its associated pathologies is not a single entity but a complex array of unbalanced abundance of micronutrients in the diet.
    However, epidemiological studies have highlighted roles for specific micronutrients in immunity. For example, mounting evidence correlates vitamin A deficiency, which is still highly prevalent among children and pregnant women in several African and Asian countries with a high risk of intestinal and respiratory infections. These observations were substantiated by experimental data as early as 1925, when rats on a diet deficient in vitamin A were found to develop thymic atrophy. It is now understood that different processes require different amounts of micronutrients, with the immune system generally the largest consumer. In view of this, the World Health Organization established a vitamin A–supplementation program, which had a positive effect on morbidity and mortality rates of infectious diseases in deprived children. Interestingly, low vitamin A levels are also associated with reduced efficacy of vaccination protocols, but the benefits of vitamin A supplementation during vaccination are still a matter of controversy.

See also

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