Balanced Diet For Teens Is Must

When a child enters his teens, i.e., he achieves the age between thirteen and nineteen, he is developing at a fast pace. It is this age a lot of changes take place in the body of teen aged children. During this time major hormonal changes take place in girls. They attain the age of puberty and menstrual cycles start. To cope up with the developing mind and body, a healthy diet is a must.

A healthy and balanced diet for teens does not mean diet rich in fat and sugar. By healthy diet we mean a balanced diet containing lots of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients necessary for healthy growth and development of the body. At this age the grown up children start to go out on their own and develop a liking for fast and junk food due to its taste, and start to avoid homemade healthy food. Junk food is rich in unsaturated fat and sugar. Due to this it is a cause of obesity.

Obesity is spreading like an epidemic in the developed world and the growing children need to be careful on this count. Though being slim can be considered an asset but being too thin is also bad. As such, a balanced diet plan needs to be drawn up. This plan can be as follows:

The diet plan should be such that it provides you body all types of vitamins and minerals. While planning a diet ensure that you consume lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Uncooked vegetables are rich in vitamins and minerals as during cooking lots of nutrients are burnt off. In addition to energy, fruits and vegetables are a source of fibre necessary for a healthy digestive system. Fibre forms a mass and helps keep the digestive tract clean and clear.

In case sufficient energy is not provided to the body, the supply of nutrition level to the brain is likely to be reduced, resulting in improper development of the brain and the child may get physically impaired. To enable the child to have healthy growth it is necessary to get his BMI checked. The effort should be to adjust weight by increasing or decreasing food according to the level desirable by the BMI index.

The desired growth should be by natural method. There is a tendency with children to eat junk food and cover up the nutritional deficiency so caused by eating food supplements in the form of tablets. To increase profits some companies do advertise their products making tall claims. These may be all right for elderly people in whose case capacity of the body to absorb nutrients from food has gone down, but not in case of young adults or teens. If they start consuming supplements on a regular basis, chances are that as they grow up, the body demands these for full life time and does not absorb them from food.