Enhancing Our Health and Educational Status with Good Nutrition

Sound education is sequel to having a healthy and sound body which largely depends on eating good foods. When you are healthy, you not only feel and look your best, but you think more clearly and get along better with others. Quite often, health is usually associated with good food because the latter plays a vital role in nourishing the body hence, ensuring its healthiness. This makes good nutrition an indispensable factor for the body’s state of health. However, one may ask, what are the components of a good nutrition?

Good nutrition involves eating meals that contain the different food nutrients in the correct proportions. This entails the selection of different food stuffs rich in the nutrients that will provide nourishment for the body. Good nutrition is essential for normal organ development and functioning, for normal reproduction, growth and maintenance, for optimum activity level and working efficiency, for resistance to infection and disease and for the ability to repair bodily damage or injury. This can be achieved by eating a well-balanced diet selected from all the food groups-protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals. The potentials of a good (balanced) diet to maintain a healthy life must never be underestimated for it recuperates the body that has undergone lots of physical stress and tension associated with modern living.

Nnamani and Ibenyenwa, in their book; Education, healthy living and Nutritional Development, affirms that, the ability of an individual to maintain a body fit enough to continue to carry out the normal functioning of the body both externally and internally is achieved mainly by personal service of the body through food eating habits, plenty of rest and adequate body exercises. For an individual to attain satisfactory state of health, his eating habits must be checked ‘ab-initio’, that is, as an offspring (unborn child). At this stage, it requires good medical care and adequate nutrition because its health depends so much on that of the mother-her diet and ingestion of drugs or chemicals. During post-pregnancy, the infant requires adequate breast milk which is more nutritious than any artificial milk at least for the first six months of its life. The importance of good nutrition at an early stage is that, the child is able to develop both physically and mentally, also his intellectual capacities are greatly enhanced, all of which are evidence of a healthy body.

With a good health, the prospects of an individual achieving his goals in life are higher. He will be able to perform actively in his chosen career-be it in business, education, sport or craft. What he accomplishes is deeply and continuously affected by his physical health, his intellectual adequacy, his interest in his work and his emotional freedom to the demand of his activities- this was constantly echoed by Ismail in his publication titled; Psychological Aspects of Physical Education and Sports. A poor health will create deficiency in a child’s educational status. This is because his ill-health will not allow him to take full advantage of the schooling available; also he will be prone to a very low IQ when compared to his fellow classmates thus his educational development is retarded. For the unhealthy adult, his ability to use the knowledge and skills acquired depends on his mental and physical fitness. If an adult is impaired by physical or mental ailments, he can not take advantage of his intellectual capabilities to develop his society.

In Nigeria today, a good percentage of children, youths and adults suffer from physical and mental ailments traceable to nutritional deficiency and this has cut short their potentials in life. Little or no emphasis is made on the place of good nutrition in the life of individual thereby encouraging indiscriminate poor eating habits. This in the long run has increasingly affected their educational outputs. One of the imperatives of nation building and national development lies in a sound education for its citizens that are of sound health. For the individual’s food, his health and education are all interwoven together and must be treated together and never in isolation.