What is a healthy diet? A well balanced diet that’s healthy is all about giving your body the nutrition it needs and that nutrition comes from nothing better than food in its most basic form, raw and straight from the garden. This unit is going to talk about people’s eating habits and people’s food personalities.

Passage 1 Our Changing Diet

[A]What do most Americans and Canadians usually eat? Many people think that the typical North American diet consists of fast food—hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, pizza, fried chicken, and so on. They think Americans and Canadians also eat a lot of convenience foods, usually frozen or canned, and junk food—candy, cookies, potato chips, and other things without much nutritional value. Unfortunately, this description is not totally inaccurate. The American diet is generally high in sugar, salt, fat, and cholesterol, and these substances can cause health problems.

[B]However, some people’s eating habits are changing. They are becoming more and more interested in good health, and nutrition is an important part of health. North Americans are eating less red meat and fewer eggs, and they are eating more chicken and fish. Chicken and fish contain less fat than meat and eggs. Many people are also buying more fresh vegetables and eating them raw or cooked quickly in very little water in order to keep the vitamins.

[C]Restaurant menus are also changing to reflect people’s growing concern with good nutrition. The “typical” North Americans diet now includes food from many different countries. More ethnic restaurants are opening in big cities in the United States and Canada. Foods from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, India, and the Middle East are very popular. Even fast food places now offer “lean” (low-fat)hamburgers, broiled or roasted (instead of fried)chicken, and salad bars with a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables.

[D]How are we going to eat in the future? Because we now know about the importance of nutrition, we will probably continue to eat more fish and vegetables and less meat. We will probably buy convenience foods in supermarkets, but frozen foods many be more nutritious and canned foods may have less salt and sugar. Our junk food will not be “junk” at all because instead of candy bars we will eat “nutrition bars” with a lot of vitamins and protein. In the future, our diet will probably be even more interesting and healthful than it is now.

[E]In the United States and Canada, food is a very common topic of conversation. People are always discussing new dishes, restaurants, diet plans, and ideas about nutrition. The arguments about the best dishes and foods will continue: Are vegetarians really healthy? Is a high-fiber diet with a lot of raw fruits and vegetable better than a diet of cooked foods? Is a little alcohol good for relaxation, or is all alcohol harmful? Is some caffeine good for energy, or is caffeine always bad? Can yellow vegetables really prevent cancer? Will eating garlic help avoid heart attacks? One thing we do know for sure: The key to good nutrition is balance. How do we achieve that balance? We can choose foods from a variety of sources, control the quantities that we eat, limit fats, and exercise.

Notes to the Text

typical: of the qualities or characteristics that identify a group or kind or category;

hot dogs: A cooked sausage that consists of a combination of beef and pork or all beef, which is cured, smoked, and cooked. Seasonings may include coriander, garlic, ground mustard, nutmeg, salt, sugar, and white pepper. They are fully cooked but are usually served hot. Sizes range from big dinner frankfurters to tiny cocktail size. Hot dogs are among America's favorite foods. Every year, Americans consume on average 60 hot dogs! Hot dogs are primarily regarded as a fun, summertime food, and most are eaten between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

french fries: strips of potato fried in deep fat, also french-fried potatoes.

pizza: Italian open pie made of thin bread dough spread with a spiced mixture of e.g. tomato sauce and cheese

this description is not totally inaccurate: This sentence is not a usual double negative. It means that the description is partially correct. Without the word totally, the sentence this description is not inaccurate means that this description is accurate, which is a normal double negative emphasizing the positive opinion.

fat: 脂肪

cholesterol：胆固醇

red meat：Meats are often classified by the type of animal from which they are taken. Red meat refers to the meat taken from mammals and usually they are red in color;white meat refers to the meat taken from fowl; seafood refers to the meat taken from fish and shellfish; and gamerefers to meat taken from animals that are not commonly domesticated. In addition, most commonly consumed meats are specifically identified by the live animal from which they come. Beef refers to the meat from cattle,veal from calves, pork from hogs,lamb from young sheep, and mutton from sheep older than two years.

concern: a feeing of worry, especially about something such as a social problem, someone’s health, etc. It is usually followed by prepositions about, over or for.

Japan:日本Tokyo is the capital.

Korea: 韩国Seoul is the capital .

Thailand：泰国 Bangkok is the capital.

India：印度 New Delhi is the capital.

broiled or roasted (instead of fried)chicken: Broiled chicken are cooked under direct heat or over a flame on a barbeque. Roasted chicken are cooked by dry heat in the oven. Compared with deep fried chicken with fat, broied and roasted chicken are less greasy and much lower in fat.

salad bars: a bar where diners can assemble a salad to their own taste. 

probably: used to saying that “something is likely to happen, likely to be true or the speaker approves it or hopes it will happen”.

diet plans: A plan to balance or control what one eats in order to keep fit, keep a slim figure or for some medical reasons.

argument: A discussion in which disagreement is expressed; a debate, a quarrel or a dispute.

caffeine: a bitter stimulating ingredient found in coffee and tea.

harmful: causing or likely to cause harm. The suffix -ful is added to nouns or verbs to mean “full of, filled with”. Other examples are colorful, meaningful, joyful, delightful.

*antomym: harmless. The suffix -less means “lack of, without”. E.g. powerless, tasteless, nameless, endless.

yellow vegetables: vegetables that are yellow in color such as soybeans. Vitamin A is the major ingredient of these vegetables.

prevent: To keep something from happening or keep someone from doing something.

avoid: stay clear from; keep away from; keep out of the way of  someone or something.

 

Vocabulary

Nouns

diet: The usual food and drink of a person or animal as in the typical North American diet.

It can also mean “a regulated selection of foods for medical reasons”.

The phrase go/be on a diet means having a limited amount of food because you want to get thinner.

dish: In the passage, it means “the food served in a dish”; any particular kind of food; as, a cold dish; a warm dish; a delicious dish. As a noun, it can also mean “a vessel (容器), as a plate, a bowl, used for serving up food at the table”.

relaxation: the noun of relax meaning a way of resting and enjoying yourself.

quantity: It means “an amount of something that can be counted or measured” while the word quality means “the degree to which somenthing is good or bad”.

Verbs

consist: Be composed of; be made up of, usually used together with the preposition “of”.

balance: a state of equilibrium. Literally, the phrase keep your balance means you “keep the state in which your weight is evenly spread so that you do not fall”. The opposite is lose your balance.

*antomym:imbalance

Adjectives

inaccurate: not accurate, wrong. In is a prefix meaning “no”, which can be added to many adjectives to mean the opposite, such as invisible, incorrect, inexpensive.

high-fiber & low-fat: These are two compound words, each consisting of an adjective and a noun hyphenated in-between. This is one of the many compounding methods of word formation in English. Words like large-scale and high-class belong to the same type. They function as adjectives. High-fiber food contains a lot of fiber while low-fat food is relatively low in fat.

Adverbs

probably: used to saying that “something is likely to happen, likely to be true or the speaker approves it or hopes it will happen”. The word possibly is used to saying that “something may be true, although the speaker is not sure about it”.

Culture Note

Alcohol

There is an extensive selection of beers, wines and liquors in western countries. Generally speaking, any beverage which contains more than 14% alcohol is considered “Spirits” or “Liquor”, such as whisky, gin, rum, sherry and brandy. Wines and beers usually contain less than 14% alcohol. Brandy is distilled liquor fermented together with other juices, with 45%-50% alcohol. Whisky is made from fermented mash of grain, especially corn, with 40%-45% alcohol. Cocktails are fancy mixed drinks. A cocktail is a mixture of distilled alcohol (like Brandy, Whisky, gin or rum), spice and other beverages.

The Middle East

The lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula and Iran and sometimes beyond. The central part of this general area was formerly called the Near East, a name given to it by some of the first modern Western geographers and historians, who tended to divide the Orient into three regions. Near East applied to the region nearest Europe, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf; Middle East, from the Gulf to Southeast Asia; and Far East, those regions facing the Pacific Ocean.

The change in usage began to evolve prior to World War II and tended to be confirmed during that war, when the term Middle East was given to the British military command in Egypt. Thus defined, the Middle East consisted of the states or territories of Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine (now Israel), Jordan, Egypt, The Sudan, Libya, and the various states of Arabia proper (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, or Trucial Oman [now United Arab Emirates]. Subsequent events have tended, in loose usage, to enlarge the number of lands included in the definition. The three North African countries of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are closely connected in sentiment and foreign policy with the Arab states. In addition, geographic factors often require statesmen and others to take account of Afghanistan and Pakistan in connection with the affairs of the Middle East.

Occasionally Greece is included in the compass of the Middle East because the Middle Eastern (then Near Eastern)question in its modern form first became apparent when the Greeks rose in rebellion to assert their independence of the Ottoman Empire in 1821. Turkey and Greece, together with the predominantly Arabic-speaking lands around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, were also formerly known as the Levant.