Diet: A Key to Your Health

Your diet is the key to your health. Diet is an important factor in the cause and cure of many ills. The wrong foods can cause allergic reactions ranging from the well-known strawberry rash to death from allergic asphyxiation. The right foods can help you clear up such allergic reactions. The wrong foods can bring on overweight, sap your energy, and rob you of zest and well-being. And in the degenerative diseases of the heart and blood vessels, diet is the key; it is the difference between active good health and dangerous illness.

By eliminating certain foods from your diet, by including others in the right amounts, and by the use of nutritional supplements, you can achieve at least a 50 per cent protection against heart attack. Unfortunately, as simple as proper dieting is, doctors have found it to be one of the most difficult measures to prescribe for their patients, and one of the most difficult to get them to follow. Proper diet is the easiest and safest thing a physician can prescribe. But because eating habits are so firmly established, and because dietary therapy takes time, many follow a stop-and-go routine that offers little long-range benefits.

A healthy diet does not mean starvation or tasteless foods. Yet a corrective diet does not mean either starvation or the grim necessity of eating unpalatable foods. Moreover, a little experimenting in the kitchen will soon produce meals that, from the standpoint of taste and aesthetic appeal, will be equal if not superior to, the high-fat dishes to which you are accustomed.

 You do not have to lose energy-good diet increases vigor. Neither does it mean a loss of energy or a sharp reduction in poundage, unless you are overweight, in which case the excess fat is melted off. In fact, if you adhere to the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet recommended, you will feel better; have more vigor, and firmer muscles than before. If you have a faulty fat metabolism, the diet may substantially prolong your life.