Most of society hears the term dietary and limits it to products sold in herbaceous plants (ginseng, real food…) and to the advice given there, even if it is a much broader and deeper concept. Dietetics is mainly related to the sciences that study food and the processes that take place in the human body, such as bromatology, nutrition or physiology.
For example, bromatology explores the details of food, that is, the different steps that must follow the products obtained from agriculture, livestock and fishing until we reach our table; therefore, within this field we could frame gastronomy.
Nutrition, for its part, focuses on the ingredients of food and the parts of its direction in our body: digestion, absorption, metabolism, etc. Based on previous knowledge, dietetics investigate what foods and how much the body needs in different situations (parenting, pregnancy, athletes) to maintain health and prevent disease.
And finally, food is putting all this knowledge into practice. Once the health or disease situation of each person is known, it shows what to do and the steps to take to carry out or implement a specific diet. An adequate diet is therefore the one that meets all the needs of each one, thus leaving optimal health. In the same way, it is an inadequate diet that prevents maintaining an adequate state of health by excess or defect.
And how does that happen in our society? As is known, one of the most serious problems of today’s “advanced” societies is that we consume superfluous foods, which causes overweight or obesity. On the other hand, the really necessary foods are consumed less than enough and hence diseases such as anemia, decalcification, which today are so common.
Just as medicine deals with life, we can say it helps to live longer by taking care of dietary health.