Keeping a healthy lifestyle
During the past few months, when one after the other every country in the world was hit by the new Coronavirus, our lives have been strongly impacted both by the virus itself and the limitations to our daily lives imposed due to public health reasons. Luckily, the measures that were taken, seem to have helped limiting the spread of the virus.
However, during the months spent in quarantine, with all of our habits changed and our daily grind interrupted, it has been comprehensibly difficult for people to maintain a normal a lifestyle as possible, including keeping healthy eating habits, with the correct amounts of macro and micro nutrients, vitamins, minerals. This article is focused on this particular aspect, the relation between coronavirus and nutrition.
Now more than ever, it is essential to give the right importance to our health. In order to do this, we need to pay attention to our nutrition. If it is true that “we are what we eat”, as many philosophers from the past stated, then we must review, if necessary, our eating habits. As a matter of fact, eating healthy contributes to the building of barriers, which defend our body from external attacks. This is one of many daily prevention measures that help us stay healthy.
Choose to eat healthy
Many scientific studies state that a healthy diet and a healthy lifestyle help us to strengthen our body natural defences. It is confirmed that having a low-fat diet greatly improves our immune system which defends us from the attacks of certain microorganisms, which are harmful to our health.
Our body weight must be considered, too. In fact, overweight and obesity can prove dangerous for our immune system. Studies have shown correlation between highest risk of infections and excessive body weight.
On the contrary, the consumption of vegetable-based food, which has lower calorie density, but contains useful components such as fibers, minerals and vitamins, helps reduce the risk of inflammation of our body. Therefore, a bad nutrition makes our body more vulnerable to pathogens attacks. How can we defend ourselves? Our organism has a defence system made of layered barriers that, when they work at their best, should protect our health from both external agents and internal malfunctions. This system is characterized by a series of different peculiarities, and it has got the capability to distinguish the “self”, which means what belongs to us, from the “not-self”, which are viruses and bacteria. In order to do that our body uses different components such as organs – spleen, thymus gland, bone marrow and lymph nodes – tissues, cellular components of different characteristics as leucocytes and proteins – mainly glycoproteins like antibodies.
As a whole, all of these components can be influenced by many factors, and therefore they could lose the capability of working properly for our body. Some of the influencing factors are stress, unbalanced diet, sedentary lifestyle and old age, and they can make our body and health more vulnerable.
Healthy eating prevents disease
Having good eating habits is very important, which means taking the right daily amount of nutrients, vitamins, prebiotics and probiotics. A good nutrition, physical activity and a healthy lifestyle in general, including a good hygiene like washing our hands often, can help prevent infections. The diet has to be varied and needs to respect each component amount, to avoid a lack or an excess of any of them.
Eating healthy is an excellent way to prevent diseases and to protect ourselves and the people around us from the flu and other conditions.