INTRODUCTION

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for an organism. In majority of the cases, food comes from animal, plant or fungal origin, all of them containing essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins or minerals, ingested by the organism to sustain vital functions, stimulate growth, repairment processes and for supplying energy requirements.

Each species has different feeding behaviours to match their metabolic demands, often influenced by geographical, environmental and ecological context. In case of humankind, our omnivorous diet has been the result of multiple evolutive developments, adaptable to different ecosystems but usually consisting in two main methods: hunting and agriculture. Nowdays, the intensive food demands our continued global population growth requires is supplied with intensive agricultural labours joined with a massive livestock component, united with complex food processing and food distribution systems.

In order to study and organise the physiological processes of human nutrition with a closer look, we organise the basic food groups through a representation well-known as the food pyramid. In this investigation project, we are going to divide this image into three main groups: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Needless to say this diagram must be complemented with an appropriate ingest of water, daily exercise and weight control, a moderate alcohol consumption and with another crucial image for responsible and correct nutrition, the Healthy Eating Plate. Both of representations summarize the best dietary information, although nutrition is a constant-changing science.