Healthy diet

• Adequate, as they meet, without exceeding, our body's energy and essential nutrient requirements in support of all the many body functions.
• Diverse, as they include various nutritious foods within and across food groups to help secure the sufficient nutrients needed by our bodies.
• Balanced, as they include energy from the three primary sources in a balanced way and foster healthy weight, growth and activity, and to prevent disease.
• Moderate, as they include only small quantities of foods that may have a negative impact on health, such as highly salty and sugary foods.

  Recommendations

World Health Organization

1. Maintain a healthy weight by eating roughly the same number of calories that your body is using.
2. Limit intake of fats to no more than 30% of total caloric intake, preferring unsaturated fats to saturated fats. Avoid trans fats.
3. Eat at least 400 grams of fruits and vegetables per day. A healthy diet also contains legumes, whole grains, and nuts.
4. Limit the intake of simple sugars to less than 10% of caloric intake.
5. Limit salt/sodium from all sources and ensure that salt is iodized. Less than 5 grams of salt per day can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

• ensuring that the foods chosen have sufficient vitamins and certain minerals;
• avoiding directly poisonous and carcinogenic substances;
• avoiding foods contaminated by human pathogens ;
• and replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats in the diet, which can reduce the risk of coronary artery disease and diabetes.

  United States Department of Agriculture

American Heart Association / World Cancer Research Fund / American Institute for Cancer Research

Harvard School of Public Health

• Eat healthy fats: healthy fats are necessary and beneficial for health. HSPH "recommends the opposite of the low-fat message promoted for decades by the USDA" and "does not set a maximum on the percentage of calories people should get each day from healthy sources of fat." Healthy fats include polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, found in vegetable oils, nuts, seeds, and fish. Foods containing trans fats are to be avoided, while foods high in saturated fats like red meat, butter, cheese, ice cream, coconut and palm oil negatively impact health and should be limited.
• Eat healthy protein: the majority of protein should come from plant sources when possible: lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains; avoid processed meats like bacon.
• Eat mostly vegetables, fruit, and whole grains.
• Drink water. Consume sugary beverages, juices, and milk only in moderation. Artificially sweetened beverages contribute to weight gain because sweet drinks cause cravings. 100% fruit juice is high in calories. The ideal amount of milk and calcium is not known today.
• Pay attention to salt intake from commercially prepared foods: most of the dietary salt comes from processed foods, "not from salt added to cooking at home or even from salt added at the table before eating."
• Vitamins and minerals: must be obtained from food because they are not produced in our body. They are provided by a diet containing healthy fats, healthy protein, vegetables, fruit, milk and whole grains.
• Pay attention to the carbohydrates package: the type of carbohydrates in the diet is more important than the amount of carbohydrates. Good sources for carbohydrates are vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains. Avoid sugared sodas, 100% fruit juice, artificially sweetened drinks, and other highly processed food.

Others

The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches.
Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do. Knowledge in this case is not, as of yet, power; would that it were so.

The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods. Follow these precepts and you will go a long way toward preventing the major diseases of our overfed society—coronary heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and a host of others.... These precepts constitute the bottom line of what seem to be the far more complicated dietary recommendations of many health organizations and national and international governments—the forty-one "key recommendations" of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, for example.... Although you may feel as though advice about nutrition is constantly changing, the basic ideas behind my four precepts have not changed in half a century. And they leave plenty of room for enjoying the pleasures of food.