HealthyEating
1 Today, on the street, there seem to be more and more children who look very fat. Perhaps they grow fat because they eat too much a day. But this may not be the whole story. Another factor might be that they are not eating properly.
2 Over the past ten years, people — especially young people — have come to realize the need to change their eating habits, because much of the food they eat, particularly processed foods, is not good for the health. As a result, there has been a growing interest in natural foods: foods which do not contain chemicals and which have not been affected by the chemical fertilizers widely used in farming today.
3 Natural foods include vegetables, fruit and grain which have been grown in soil that is rich in essential vitamins and minerals. This is a natural process, in comparison with the use of chemicals and fertilizers. In the latter case, the main purpose is to increase the amount — but not the quality — of foods grown in commercial farming areas.
4 Natural foods also include animals which have been allowed to feed and move freely in the outdoors. Compare this with what happens in the mass production of poultry: in some farms, for example, thousands of chickens live crowded together. Chickens raised in this way often do not taste good as food; they also produce eggs which lack important vitamins.
5 There are other aspects of healthy eating which are now receiving increasing attention from experts on diet. Take, for example, the question of sugar. This is actually a non-essential food! Although a natural product, such as honey, can be good to taste, we can in fact do without it. There are no vitamins in it, no minerals — and no fibre. All it does is provide us with energy, in the form of calories. Of course, sugar is not harmful in itself, but eating too much of it will cause problems. The fact is that the quantity of sugar we use has grown quickly over the last two hundred years and in Britain today each person consumes an average of 200 pounds of sugar a year!
6 Nowadays fibre is considered to be an essential part of a healthy diet. A lot of fibre is found in unprocessed flour and in many vegetables. However, the fibre has been removed in foods like white bread. In some countries where the national diet contains large quantities of unrefined flour and vegetables, certain diseases are comparatively rare. That is why modern experts on“healthy eating”place a lot of emphasis on the eating of vegetables.
健康饮食
现在，大街上肥胖的孩子越来越多。他们长得胖可能是因为他们每天吃得太多，但还有别的原因，比如他们吃得不健康。
在过去的十年中，人们，特别是年轻人，已经意识到有必要改变他们的饮食习惯，原因是他们吃的很多东西对身体有害，特别是加工食品。因此，人们对天然食品，即不含有化学成分或是未受到目前农业生产中广泛使用的化肥污染的食品，产生了越来越浓厚的兴趣。
天然食品包括那些生长在富含维他命和矿物质的泥土中的蔬菜、水果和粮食。与施用化肥相比，这些食品的栽培是一个天然过程。施用化肥的目的只是为了提高商业化农场的产量而非质量。
天然食品也包括那些可以在户外自由捕食和自由活动的动物。这种饲养方式和在一些农场上成千上万的鸡黑压压地挤在一起的大规模禽类饲养是完全不一样的。通过后种方式养出的鸡味道并不鲜美，而且生出的蛋也缺乏人体所需的重要维他命。
营养学家对于健康饮食的其他方面也开始日益关注起来，比如糖。其实它本来并非必不可少的食品。比如说蜂蜜吧，虽然是天然食品，而且味美可口，但我们实际上并不是非得喝它不可。它既不含维他命，也不含矿物质，更没有纤维。它只给我们提供以卡路里为主要形式的能量。当然，糖类本身对人体无害，但吃多了就会有问题。事实上，在过去两百年间，我们对糖的消耗增长过快，如今每个英国人每年平均消耗200磅糖！
如今，纤维被认为是健康饮食必不可少的一部分。许多蔬菜和未经加工的面粉中含有大量纤维。然而，在诸如白面包这样的食品中纤维就被去除了。在有些国家，日常饮食含有大量粗加工的面包和蔬菜，某些疾病的发生率就很低。这就是为什么如今的“健康饮食”专家提倡吃蔬菜的原因。
