Nutritionists warn against unhealthy diets

You are what you eat, and it is a nutritionist's job to ensure what his or her client puts into the body is healthy.

Italian nutritionist Alberto Fiorilo, a practitioner of natural biomedicine, recently said at an Italian embassy seminar in Beijing that too many people in the modern world are not eating healthily.

Natural biomedicine is based on the idea that nature has the resources to heal sick people.

Statistics from the World Health Organization and disease control and prevention centers in the United States and Europe have shown that the prevalence of diabetes, obesity and cancer among children and adolescents has climbed high in the past three decades. This, Fiorilo believes, can be largely contributed to changes in lifestyles and dietary habits.

"Unhealthy food is the primary enemy to stay healthy," Fiorilo says, adding that people are eating too much red meat and processed food.

An adult should eat less than 300 grams of red meat a week. Even Mediterranean diets are not as healthy as people think, because modern bread is mostly made from fine flour and does not provide comprehensive nutrients, such as vitamins, he adds.

Fan Zhihong, another nutritionist at the seminar, said Chinese people's eating patterns have changed greatly in the past 30 years, which has contributed to a rise in incidences of chronic diseases.

Fan is a member of the board of directors of the Chinese Nutrition Society and is an associate professor of nutrition and food safety at the Beijing-based China Agricultural University.

Generally, Chinese consume too little whole grain, potatoes and yams, but too much animal-based food, resulting in an imbalanced diet, Fan says, adding that many Chinese people's consumption of pork is very high, compared with low-fat meats such as poultry and fish.