Healthy Eating

The foundation of a healthy diet: It’s not hard to figure out how to eat a healthy diet; it just requires a little planning. Fortunately, there are some valuable tools available to give you the guidance you need to eat healthy.
These tools are neither fad diets nor miracle cures. Rather, they are tried and true principles and guidelines that can help you develop your own individualized diet plan.
Powerful Tools for Healthy Eating: Two useful tools are the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Food Pyramid. Both were developed by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services. The two tools work together.
The Pyramid is a graphic illustration showing different food groups and the Dietary Guidelines provides further guidance for selecting health-promoting proportions from each group.
One way to view these tools is to think of the Dietary Guidelines as building blocks and the Pyramid as the balanced and powerful structure that results when the blocks are all assembled together.

If you want to improve your diet, simply follow the plan below, step-by-step:

Step 1 - Set your health or weight goals.

Step 2 - Review dietary guidelines. See Dietary Guidelines, below.

Step 3 - Calculate your personal caloric requirements.

Step 4 - Factor in your individual goals, concerns or current health problems.

Step 5 - Learn about serving sizes.

Step 6 - Calculate your daily servings for each food group. See Food Pyramid.

Step 7 - Read food labels in the store, adapting each label to you

- caloric requirement. See Food Labels.

Step 8 - Keep track of what you are eating. See Food Diary.

Step 9 - Try new, healthful foods you’ve never eaten before.

The USDA Dietary Guidelines: In summary, eat a variety of foods, balance eating with physical activity, eat plenty of grains, fruits and vegetables, and be moderate in your consumption of sugar, salt, sodium, and alcohol.
To maintain good health, the human body needs more than forty nutrients. Eating a variety of foods greatly increases the chances you are getting all the nutrients you need.
Different foods provide different special nutrients:
The cruciferous vegetables, which include broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, contain unique phytochemicals associated with lower risks of some diseases. Tomatoes and tomato products contain potent antioxidants. Leafy, dark-green vegetables provide potassium, vitamin C, beta-carotene, calcium, iron and fiber.
Unrefined grains provide fiber. Milk products contain bone-strengthening calcium. You are less likely to have trouble with food allergies if you vary your diet and reduce the amounts you consume of any single food product which may be giving you problems.
Eating a variety of foods also keeps your taste buds stimulated and makes your meals more interesting.Keep trying new foods to avoid getting into a dietary rut.
You may want to consciously think about rotating your foods. It’s easy, if you just think about having different colored fruits and vegetables on different days or at different meals and plan to regularly rotate your protein and grain sources