Planning a Healthy Diet

1. Planning a Healthy Diet By: Kaci Thompson

2. Principles and Guidelines • There are six basic diet-planning principles to keep in mind: • Adequacy • Balance • kCalorie (energy) Control • Nutrient Density • Moderation • Variety

3. Adequacy • Adequacy means that the diet provides all the essential nutrients, fiber, and energy in amounts sufficient to maintain health. • Example: We lose iron on a daily basis (and require more if female) and need to consume foods that contain iron.

4. Balance • The art of balancing the diet involves consuming enough, but not too much, of each type of food. • Example: Eating fish or meat for iron and drinking milk for calcium. Fish, meat and poultry are high in iron but low in calcium; Milk is high in calcium but low in iron. These two balance out the body’s needs for both nutrients.

5. kCalorie (energy) Control • An adequate diet with energy control takes careful planning. • It takes in to consideration adequacy, balance, moderation and variety. • But most importantly, is centered around nutrient density, which means to select foods that have high nutrient density.

6. Nutrient Density • Nutrient density also promotes adequacy and kcalorie control. • Nutrient-dense foods are food products that deliver the most nutrients for the least food energy. • Foods that are notably low in nutrient density are called empty-kcalorie foods. • These foods deliver energy from sugar, fat, or both with little, or no proteins, minerals or vitamins.

7. Nutrient Density contd • Ranking foods based on their overall nutrient composition is known as nutrient profiling. • Example: 300 mg of calcium from 1 ½ oz cheddar cheese or 1 cup of fat-free milk. The cheese delivers twice as many kcalories than the milk. Both are good choices for calcium, however, the milk is better when taking into consideration your kcalorie daily limit.

8. Moderation • A person practicing dietary moderation eats foods rich in fat and sugar only on occasion and regularly selects foods low in solid fats and added sugars. • This improves the practice of picking nutrient dense foods. • Example: Craving chocolate? Eating 2 small squares of extra dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate or the whole dark chocolate bar.

9. Variety • If you eat a wide selection of foods within and among the major food groups, then your diet has a variety of foods. • Different foods, even in the same food group, can contain different nutrients. • No food is guaranteed to be entirely free of substances that, in excess, could be harmful.

10. Variety Contd • Example: Strawberries are high in vitamin C while apricots are high in vitamin A. • Example of excess: Strawberries might contain trace amounts of one contaminant, the apricots another.

11. A Well Planned Diet…. Delivers adequate nutrients, a balanced array of nutrients, and an appropriate mount of energy. It is based on nutrient-dense foods, moderate in substances that can be detrimental to health, and varied in its selections.