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Keeping Healthy Eating
If you want to stay healthy you need to eat the right foods. The food we eat is made up of seven food types. They are all important. To keep us alive and healthy we need to make sure we eat a "balanced diet"- this means eating the right amounts of these different food types. Too much of one type can ruin your health.
This table shows the seven food types;

Food Type	What it does for you	You get it from these foods
Carbohydrates (starch)	Gives you energy	Bread Pasta some vegetables (e.g. potatoes) oats,wheat,cereals
Carbohydrates (sugar)	Gives you energy	Sugar Biscuits Cakes Sweets etc
Proteins	To help you grow and repair damage	Fish nuts Eggs Milk
Fats	Gives you energy	Milk,Cheese,Butter Meat,fat and oil from cooking.
Vitamins and Minerals	Keeps your cells healthy	Fruit and vegetables
Fibre	Helps your food move through your gut	Whole grain bread,cereals Fruit Vegetables
Water	Over 70% of your body is water, you need it!	Drinks

Which of these meals shows a balanced diet ? Click the buttons to find out.

Think about your favourite meal. What food types does it contain? If you ate nothing else for a year or two do you think you would stay healthy?

Can you put foods into the right groups click here to find out

Muscles
We all have muscles, without them we wouldn't be able to move! Your muscles work very hard when you exercise or run and play. All that energy has to come from somewhere, it comes from the food we eat. The energy is carried to the muscles by your blood. To release the energy, and work, your muscles also need the gas oxygen. This is also carried to the muscle by the blood. You might notice that after a lot of running about your heart starts to pound really hard, you feel very hot and you need to breath very fast. Can you work out why these things happen? Read on to find out.

The Heart
The heart is really just a big muscle, about the size of your fist. It works day and night to pump blood round your body. It has to last you a very long time so you better look after it, once it stops so do you!Too many fatty foods can be very bad for it, so is smoking and too much alcohol.

The heart beats around 3 billion times in the averages person's life.
About 8 million blood cells die in the human body every second, and the same number are born each second.
Within a tiny droplet of blood, there are some 5 million red blood cells.
It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.
Red blood cells make approximately 250,000 round trips of the body before returning to the bone marrow, where they were born, to die.
Red blood cells may live for about 4 months circulating throughout the body, feeding the 60 trillion other body cells.

The blood is the transport system by which oxygen and nutrients reach the body's cells, and waste materials are carried away. The heart, a muscular organ, positioned behind the ribcage and between the lungs, is the pump that keeps this transport system moving.

Blood leaves the left side of the heart and travels through arteries which gradually divide into capillaries. In the capillaries, food and oxygen are released to the body cells, and carbon dioxide and other waste products are returned to the bloodstream. The blood then travels in veins back to the right side of the heart, where it is pumped directly to the lungs. In the lungs,carbon dioxide is exchanged for oxygen, and this renewed blood flows back to the left side of the heart, and the whole process begins again.

Why not try our quiz or how about trying to sort food into different food groups

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