Keeping healthy

Things like eating nutritious foods, exercising, brushing your teeth and getting enough sleep.

Brushing your teeth at least twice a day helps prevent tooth decay. Exercising for around 30-60 minutes each day means that you’ll stay fit and burn the right amount of calories.

Top facts

1. Keeping healthy means caring for your body so you have enough energy to learn, play and grow. 
2. Everyone should have five portions of fruit and vegetables, to get the right amount of nutrients.
3. A ‘portion’ means the amount of food that fits in your hand. When you eat more than what your body needs to keep healthy and energized during the day, you can put on too much weight.
4. In addition to your 5 a day, you also need portions of other food group like carbohydrates, water, fibre, minerals and fats.
5. It’s important that you get the right amount of each food group, which is called a balanced diet. Your diet is another word for the food that you eat – too much one food group and too little of another food group can can mean that your body isn’t healthy.
6. It's important not to eat too much sugar and salt: sugary foods are bad for your teeth and can be fattening, and salty foods can lead to heart disease.
7. Keep your mouth happy by brushing and flossing to have healthy teeth and gums.
8. Adults can keep healthy by avoiding things like alcohol and nicotine from cigarettes. Both of these can cause dangerous diseases.

Did you know?

All foods have nutrients in them. When you eat something, your body takes in the nutrients that it needs, and gets rid of what it doesn’t need.

Fruit and vegetables contain important nutrients for your body. You can get the most variety of nutrients if you choose fruit and veg that are different colours – like a rainbow! For instance, you can eat red tomatoes, orange oranges, yellow bananas, green grapes and blue blueberries. How many other rainbow combinations can you think of?

You can keep your teeth healthy and prevent cavities by brushing them at least twice a day – front, back, top and even your tongue! Count all the way up to 120 as you brush to make sure that you’re brushing for long enough.

Keeping healthy isn’t just about eating the right foods – it’s about getting exercise too. This doesn’t have to mean becoming an Olympic athlete. It just means playing a game of tag outside with your mates, or walking up stairs instead of taking the lift, or trying out for sports at school.

You should get 30-60 minutes of exercise every day.

What do you do or don't do to keep healthy as an individual?