Healthy foods contain vitamins, minerals and fibre. Not-so-healthy foods contain lots of sugar and fat. You need vitamins and minerals to help you grow. This is why you should mostly eat healthy foods.
Three groups of food
The foods you eat have been divided into three groups based on how healthy they are. You can use these groups to help you decide which foods to eat more of and which to eat less of.
Group 1: Eat lots of these
You should eat lots of:
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Fruit and vegetables
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Breads
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Cereals such as rice and pasta
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Beans and lentils.
These foods contain vitamins, minerals and fibre. Try to eat a wide variety of these healthy foods. Don't just pick one of these foods (such as fruit) to eat. You need to eat plenty of all of the foods from this group to stay healthy.
Plant foods contain thousands of healthy nutrients (small parts), which help to prevent serious diseases. This is why it is important to eat different types of plant foods.
Group 2: Eat some but not too much of these
These foods are also healthy and you should eat them in small to medium amounts:
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Dairy products such as milk, cheese and yoghurt
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Meat
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Chicken (without skin)
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Fish
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Nuts.
Group 3: Eat these only occasionally
These foods contain lots of sugar or fat (or both) but little or no vitamins, minerals or fibre. If you are healthy, active and not overweight, you could possibly have one or two of these 'extra foods' a day - as long as you've had your daily requirements of meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables and cereals.
But remember, these foods offer very little health benefit and are really just 'extras'. An example of one serve of these foods include:
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Sweet biscuits (2 small)
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Chocolate coated bars (1 bar)
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Potato chips (30g)
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Icecream (2 scoops)
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Lollies/chocolate (30g)
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Cake/muffin (1 medium piece).
