February is Heart Healthy Month. There’s no excuse to slack off this month by eating the wrong foods. Here are some basic tips for you and your family from Guiding Stars.
February is Heart Healthy Month. There’s no excuse to slack off this month by eating the wrong foods. Here are some basic tips for you and your family from Guiding Stars.
I’ve recently returned from the annual Food and Nutrition Conference for the American Dietetic Association (ADA). This tremendous conference regularly attracts 6,000 dietitians from across the country…all to one place…and very often with several thousand in one room. Yes, that’s a lot of dietitians.
If you are like most people, I’m sure at some point in your life you have “tried” to be on a diet. Take a second to think about and add it up. Most adults can list the many experiences they have had with one diet or another, while some are so deeply identified as “dieters” that they would do better to try to remember the few times they weren’t on a diet. Imagine how happy that makes the diet industry! Then consider how sad it is that a basic need like eating has become so tangled that we need a multi-million dollar company to “teach” us how to do it.
I’ve been writing and thinking about healthy snacking a lot lately. This is partly because the summer is just a “snacky” time, as long road trips and full days outdoors encourage snacking (plus the heat usually zaps our appetite for big meals). Healthy snacking sounds like an oxymoron, but the reality is snacking can be a good thing. I am finding more and more, however, that people just don’t know how to snack.
While the MyPlate icon is more intuitive than the previous MyPyramid which showed what we should eat on a daily basis using a triangle, the plate could still use some interpretation and education to make sense out of the recommendations regarding what to eat. First of all, what foods are included in these groups? It was not exactly clear even to me as a registered dietitian, so I dug a bit deeper and reviewed the contents of the MyPlate website. While knowing which foods are within each section of the icon is important, the real opportunity to eat healthy is to choose the most nutritious options from each of the food groups.