Diet and Energy

Diet and metabolic rate

• People should eat a balanced diet which contains some of these different kinds of nutrients:
  • carbohydrates, fats and protein for energy
  • small amounts of vitamins and mineral ions for keeping healthy.
• If your diet is not balanced, you may become malnourished (become too fat or too thin, or suffer from deficiency diseases).
• To lose body mass, people may go on a slimming diet where they eat less. Exercising more also helps. These both lead to more energy being used up than is taken in, and the body is forced to use some of its stored fat for energy.
• Metabolic rate is the rate at which chemical reactions take place in your cells.
• The greater the proportion of muscle to fat in the body, the higher the metabolic rate is likely to be. It also increases during exercise.
• Metabolic rate can be affected by your genes, which you inherit from your parents.

Fatty foods

• one gram of fat releases almost twice as much energy as one gram of carbohydrate, or one gram of protein.
• proteins are not usually a major source of energy for the body because they are used for the more important functions of growth and repair.