Diet forms and plays important role in our health care. Foods are obtained from vegetables, cereals, dry and ripe fruits, animals poultary and livestock. A balanced diet should consist of carbohydrates, proteins, minerals and vitamins. The amount of energy derived from various foods is measured in terms of calorie intake. Let’s look into what imbalanced diet is and food fads.

Excessive calorie intake is one of the biggest part of an imbalanced diet, but that is not all. Calorie intake is decided on the basis of individual requirement of a person, whether in health or disordered state (disease). While working out a food plan, based on requisites of an individual, due care may always be given to following factors.

1. Prescribed diet should consist of all the nutrients.
2. It should meet all requirements of the body.
3. Green and leafy vegetables, fruits, cereals, fibre and dairy products should form an essential  part of each diet.
4. Diet prescribed must be satiating, fulfilling, cost-effective and easily available. 
5. Food habits, health status, climatic effects and suitability should be always taken care of.
6. In health and disease dietary patterns should address themselves to an individual’s capacity to digestive capacity of a particular diet, allergy to certain foods, prohibited foods.
7. Prescribed diet should not cause any disturbance to a person’s natural style of living.
8. Except where otherwise necessarily needed, diet should preferably be form vegetable kingdom, diary products, though occasional switch-over to meat-diet may be resorted to.
9. Certain irritating foods, spices and condiments, fats should be avoided as far as possible.
10. Care should be taken to see that no food item should impair and retard functioning of excretory organs.
11. Any reaction, arising out of dietary change and intake, should be attended to without delay.
12. Age, sex, health status should always be taken into account, before prescribing any dietary plan. 
13. A person must be given an option for suitable changes in diet so as to avoid monotony and compelling him to seek refuge in forbidden food items.

It is a welcome sign that people, at large, are though of late, taking care to regulate and monitor their diets. They are now concerned about their health care and above all, take cue and inspiration from various useful programmes disseminated through audio-visual media, news papers, periodicals and magazines. Rising number of dieticians is a testimony to the foregoing revelation.

Food fads have changed our food habits, ready to eat fast foods and their mushroom growth points to our penchant and weakness for opting for food cooked outside our homes. To make a fast buck and being totally unmindful of health hazards shelled out to such food-eaters, the society is suffering from various stomach upsets.

Once in a while and that too for the sake of change, such food may be had put the problem arises when such food items tend to replace our home made foods. The former lay stress on taste and not nutrition, not on your health but on your pockets. It is pity that, in most of our homes, cooked food brought and bought from outside decorates our dinning tables. In fact, such foods spoil our health as we imbibe diseases only.

We realize our fault when our health has already been spoiled and, then, it is too late to make amends for the wrongs we have done to our body. Let us not blame the vendors. They have given us what we liked and demanded. This is a simple equation of demand and supply which trend needs to be reserved for the benefit of the consumers, and sooner it is done, the better it would be. Let us not fall a prey to our taste buds and fall ill due to our wrong and misplaced food fads. Let us remember there is no substitute for good health.