In today’s blog post, I want to refer to and put together the relationship between our lifestyle and diet with clinical alterations.

We already know that precooked foods, unbalanced diets, a sedentary lifestyle, toxic habits (tobacco, alcohol), etc., are behind many pathologies and metabolic alterations that lead to diseases, starting with being overweight.

Today I want to go deeper and look a little further, and unravel some of these processes.

When we talk about the importance of a varied diet, we do so because of our body’s need for different vitamins, minerals, healthy fats, proteins and carbohydrates as a source of energy that our body needs “daily”.

When we use the term balanced, it refers to the proportion of them that our body needs and that depends on the age, sex and energy expenditure of each individual (an athlete is not the same as a woman going through menopause or a adolescent compared to an older adult), to cite an example.

I want to add and emphasize these two areas, because it is here that the key to health and quality of life lies.

In matters of balance, it is important to know what calories we need and from what source we are going to consume them. The latest studies show and it is being observed that diets rich in carbohydrates, whether they are integral or not, can lead us down the path of overweight and arterial disease.

I will clarify this concept:

The body needs glucose to carry out energy functions itself, but what is clear is that if we consume more than our body needs at that time, lipogenesis (fat production in our liver) is activated, with it excess energy.

To regulate this, it is important to know the “glycemic load” that the food contains (that is, the amount of sugar) and the glycemic index (the speed with which glucose is absorbed into the blood), in order to avoid these glucose spikes and thus normalize the formation of fats by our body.

It has been shown that glucose from legumes, tubers, vegetables and fruit has a lower glycemic index than cereal (rice, pasta, breakfast cereals, cookies, etc.). Therefore it is important to pay attention to what is making us fat.

To finish, I would like to say that it is important to regulate and normalize the different types of fats that the body manages, in order to avoid vascular diseases such as arteriosclerosis or the formation of atherogenic plaques, which is the leading cause of death in the world. Avoiding insulin resistance, inflammation and oxidation of low-density lipoproteins LDL, is very important in terms of prevention.