Diet Abbreviations

A diet is the set of food substances that make up the nutritional behavior of living beings. The concept comes from the Greek diaita, which means “way of life”. The diet, therefore, is a habit and constitutes a way of life.

Sometimes, the term is often used to refer to special diets to lose weight or to combat certain diseases, although these cases represent modifications of the diet and not the diet itself.

Diet is made up of eating habits.

Types of diet

According to the diet they follow, living beings can be classified in different ways: carnivores (they eat meat), detritivores (they feed on dead organic substances), herbivores (they eat plants and fruits), insectivores (insects), omnivores (their system can digest meat and vegetables) or cannibals (they eat members of the same species), among others. The human being is omnivorous by nature, although for ideological or religious reasons many choose to be vegetarian (they abstain from meat and fish).

Veganism, also known as strict vegetarianism, excludes any food product of animal origin from the diet . Rather, anyone whose preparation requires the torture and murder of an animal. For this reason, it does not admit meat of any kind, eggs or milk, but only vegetable products.

While many critics of this lifestyle claim that vegans do not eat properly, veganism has been around for a long time, and actual statistics indicate that abstinence from animal products in the diet greatly reduces the risks of various types of cancer and other diseases of varying severity.

Certain foods make a diet unhealthy.

Cultural, social and economic influence on food

Human nutrition is not determined only by biological issues, but is influenced by social, economic and cultural factors . Many times the diet is conditioned by the availability of food that depends on climatic conditions and the geographical location of each region.

Nor can the personal factors that determine a diet be forgotten, such as taste, the influence of advertising of certain food products, aesthetic preferences and other issues.

The ease of obtaining certain foods, climatic conditions and social customs mean that each country and region has its own diet. Argentina, for example, has one of the highest rates of beef consumption in the world. The United States, on the other hand, is characterized by the intake of junk food, that is, foods with little nutritional value and high levels of fat or sugar, such as hamburgers. This diet has caused an epidemic of obesity in the American population.

All this shows us that the importance of diet is too great to cover only the food aspect of our lives. Each culture, each community feels identified not only with a series of customs, festivals and with one or more languages, but also with their typical dishes, those whose recipes are passed from generation to generation and that seem unable to be reproduced with the same « magic” in other regions.

Returning to the case of veganism, although the first of its features that comes to mind is that it does not allow the consumption of animal products in its diet, it is much more than that: it is a compassionate way of sharing the planet with the rest of the living beings. Giraffes cannot hunt, so they pluck fresh leaves from trees with their teeth; we cannot hunt without weapons either, and so we should limit ourselves to agriculture.

Growing our own food or raising animals in cages and then killing them for food says a lot about us. We must adopt a diet that is consistent with our principles, that makes us proud of our decisions.

List of Acronyms Related to Diet