阅读理解 Over the past ten years, people—especially young people—have come to realize the need to change their eating habits, because much of the food they eat, particularly processed foods, is not good for the health. As a result, there has been a growing interest in natural foods: foods which do not contain chemicals and which have not been affected by the chemical fertilizers widely used in farming today.
Natural foods include vegetables, fruit and grain which have been grown in soil that is rich in essential vitamins and minerals. This is a natural process, in comparison with the use of chemicals and fertilizers. In the latter case, the main purpose is to increase the amount—but not the quality—of foods grown in commercial farming areas.
Natural foods also include animals which have been allowed to feed and move freely in the outdoors. Compare this with what happens in the mass production of poultry: in some farms, for example , thousands of chickens live crowded together. Chickens raised in this way often do not taste good as food: they also produce eggs which lack important vitamins.
There are other aspects of healthy eating which are now receiving increasing attention from experts on diet. Take, for example, the question of sugar. This is actually a non - essential food! Although a natural product, such as honey, can be good to taste, we can in fact do without it. There are no vitamins in it, no minerals—and no fiber. All it does is provide us with energy, in the form of calories. Of course, sugar is not harmful in itself, but eating too much of it will cause problems. The fact is that the quantity of sugar we use has grown quickly over the last two hundred years and in Britain today each person consumes an average of 200 pounds of sugar a year!
Nowadays fiber is considered to be an essential part of a healthy diet. A lot of fiber is found in unprocessed flour and in many vegetables. However, the fiber has been removed in foods like white bread. In some countries where the national diet contains large quantities of unrefined flour and vegetables, certain diseases are comparatively rare. That is why modern experts on "healthy eating" place a lot of emphasis on the eating of vegetables.