“You have to eat everything” our mothers used to tell us when we were little. And they were not without reason, since a balanced diet with adequate proportions of food is key to reducing the risk of diseases. However, in addition to this concept, the importance of ” energy balance ” has been proven as one of the keys to avoiding obesity.
This has been shown in the last symposium ” Energy balance as a public health drive ” held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. As Gregorio Varela, professor of nutrition and food science at the San Pablo CEU University and president of the Spanish Nutrition Foundation, points out, this balance is like a bank account. “On the one hand, knowing the energy and calorie income that we have from foods that contain proteins, carbohydrates and fats; and on the other hand to know how we spend that energy that we enter ”. In other words, the energy balance is nothing more than balancing intake against expenditure.
In fact, not only genetics influence obesity, but there are other environmental and social factors that affect this balance. ” Among the most important environmental factors, diet and exercise stand out , but hours of sleep, stress, ambient temperature, etc., can also contribute to this balance,” says doctor and professor Dolores Corella, from the Unit of Genetics and Molecular Epidemiology of the Department of Preventive Medicine and CIBERobn of the University of Valencia.
Taking 2,000 more steps a day or eating 100 fewer calories are day-to-day changes recommended by experts to improve health and prevent obesity. Education and awareness are essential in preventing this problem, which is already considered one of the most ignored and growing problems in the coming years.
