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Background
Computing your food intake means that you will be analyzing the content of the food you eat. Today we have the advantage of comparing the kinds of things we eat to food guides. A food guide is a tool that gives us guidelines for evaluating how well we are eating, compared to the overall standards for healthy eating. There are a variety of different food guides that can be used to achieve this goal.
One of the more widely used food guides is promoted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and was originally known as the Food Guide Pyramid. It is now known as Choose My Plate. Choose My Plate teaches the building blocks of healthy eating and provides a Super Tracker to analyze your personal nutritional status and activity level.
We will be working with the Super Tracker as our food guide. This food guide is designed to help you choose the right portions of food in order for you to meet your dietary intake needs.
Since 1980, the needs of Americans have been set by the Department of Health and Human Services; they are titled Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Again, the dietary guidelines are what Choose My Plate uses to establish its recommendations. Be aware that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is the root information for Choose My Plate. The dietary guidelines for Americans are based on 2,000 calories. Most Americans consume more calories than they need.
Based on public health problems, for example, for adults there may be a need to increase calcium, fiber, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, and E.
Children and teens may not be getting enough calcium, potassium, fiber, magnesium, and vitamin E.
The key recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines are for Americans to consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods and beverages within basic food groups while choosing foods that limit the intake of saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, sugars, salt, and alcohol.
Another strong point made by the Dietary Guidelines is that nutrients should come from foods. This might sound silly to say, however, today's supplement market (which is highly unregulated) is immense, and the quality of some supplements can be suspect. Also, people tend to think they can get good nutrition from energy drinks on the market. Chances are that you are getting little if any nutrition from an energy drink -- the 'energy' you are probably feeling is the caffeine. You can, however, get nutrition from something like an energy bar. But remember: the main idea that the Dietary Guidelines promotes is that your body prefers to receive its nutrition from natural sources.
The USDA food guide is designed to integrate dietary recommendations into a healthy way of eating. The food guide shows us how to change our patterns from what we are currently do, and includes eating:
- More dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, beans, fruits, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products
- Less refined grains, total fats (especially the bad fats--saturated and trans fats)
- Reducing sugars and total calories
Choose My Plate, the USDA's food guidance system, illustrates the building blocks for healthy eating and demonstrates that adopting a balanced eating pattern will help you meet your intake needs. Though the plate's portions vary, no food group is more important than another as the real difference lies within portion sizes.
Watch the MyPlate: Guidelines for Healthy Living (16:52). Login information
At this point you should have an understanding of the dietary guidelines that support food guides, including Choose My Plate. How is this information used to assess your dietary intake? What types of standards can we use to evaluate our intake of food?
Going back to the Guidelines for Americans (sponsored by the USDA, and also the source backing Choose My Plate), we can take a more specific look at how to be sure we are eating the right things and getting the most out of our diets.
In general, getting enough protein and fat is not the problem for people in this country. Getting the right kinds of protein and fat is a problem. However, we may be able to aid in this problem by meeting the required amounts of fruits and vegetables in our daily diets.
Watch Sample Food Intake Analysis (2:40) to see how the guidelines can be used to analyze a typical teen's diet.
