A diet is the set of food substances that make up the nutritional behavior of living beings. The concept comes from the Greek little day, what does it mean "lifestyle" . The diet, therefore, is a habit and constitutes a way of life. Occasionally, the term is usually used to refer to special regimes to lose weight or to fight certain diseases , although these cases represent modifications of the diet and not the diet itself.
According to the diet they follow, living things can be qualified in different ways: carnivores (eat meat), detritivorous (they feed on dead organic substances), herbivores (ingest plants and fruits), insectivores (insects), omnivorous (your system can digest meat and vegetables) or cannibals (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 vegetarians (they refrain from meat and fish).
The human food It is not determined only by biological issues, but is influenced by factors social , cheap and cultural . Many times the diet is conditioned by the availability of food that depends on weather conditions and of the geographic location of each region.
Nor can they forget personal factors They determine a diet, such as taste, the influence of the advertising of certain food products, aesthetic preferences and other issues.
The ease of obtaining certain foods, climatic conditions and social customs make each country and region have its own diet. Argentina For example, it has one of the highest consumption rates of beef in the world. U.S Instead, it is characterized by the intake of junk food (of English junk food), that is, foods with little nutritional value and high levels of fats or sugars, such as hamburgers. This diet has caused an epidemic of obesity in the American population.
