 Traffic! Hey everybody, Dr. Rowe again. So we're back here with chapter two on planning a healthy diet. Let's go ahead and dive in. This is kind of a shorter chapter but really, really important one. So icebreaker, do you consider the nutrition quality of your food before you make food choices? Obviously these things are supposed to be happening in a face-to-face environment, but do you really think about that, right? We talked last chapter about how convenience and cost and taste generally are more important than people then nourishment or nutrition to value. I think we're seeing changes. Some people are starting to get a diet a lot more seriously but you can see here they give you some examples. People, when Lee chooses food based on price, which totally makes sense, especially if you don't have a lot of discretionary income, Eli is busy and values convenience so what's the best food you can get that you can prepare really quickly? Ella wants to perform well on her volleyball team. I think this is one of the reasons that IVET success, right, is I really have gotten into strength training and I think about food and how it impacts my performance, right? I don't want to eat food that doesn't make me feel good because I need to feel good for what I'm trying to accomplish. So eating to fuel your body, eating for performance, that's very good for some people. A meal is trying to lose weight so obviously thinking about calories and nutrient density, those types of things. Keisha's trying to eat more nutritious food so that would be someone that is thinking about nutrition quality and Jamar eats whatever his wife cooked so some people just, especially if you live at home or something, you just eat whatever gets put in front of you and nothing wrong with any of these things. So just, you know, you should consider nutritional quality whenever possible but it may not always be your priority especially in situations when you don't have a lot of money or time, these types of things, right? I think back to when I was single and lived in Cherokee, Iowa, you know, food was, I had all the money I'd ever need to buy food. I bought whatever food I wanted. I had tons of time to prepare it and all these types of things. Right now it's just different. Right now, you know, I'm commuting more for work and I'm working more and when I'm not working, I'm a dad and a husband and we're running kids around and we're busy and sometimes convenience has to trump other things. So, all right. So in this chapter, what are we gonna learn? Explain how each of the diet planning principles can be used to plan a healthy diet. So that's the main focus of this chapter is how do you plan a healthy diet? Use the USDA food patterns to develop a meal plan within a specified energy allowance. So basically looking at, we learned from last chapter about things like acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges and we wanna make sure we can get all the nutrients we need within our calorie budget. It's one thing if you eat 1,000 too many calories a day, it's pretty easy to get the protein and the vitamins and minerals you need but how do you design a diet that doesn't have a lot of empty calories and is nutrient-dense enough where you can get all the nutrients you need within the energy allowance that will be right for you. Compare the information on food labels. So we'll look at food labels at the end of this chapter. All right, so diet and diet planning basics. So here we see, so what does the word diet mean to you? I think this is really important, right? Words matter, right? Some people would rather use terms like eating plan or eating strategy. Technically the word diet means a way of living. That's where it came from, a Greek or Latin I can't remember, but a way of living. So your diet is just the food you eat but the problem is diet has taken on this negative connotation. It's become a four-letter word. We think, like I mentioned in the last video, we think of diet as, you know, how can I eat? You think about it as a temporary thing. It's got to start in an end date and we struggle through it as long as we can and we persist on this diet until we no longer can. Well, there's nothing sustainable about that, right? So a diet, and that's one thing we'll talk about in this chapter a lot is this idea of sustainability. How do you know, consistently good is always gonna be better than occasionally great, right? So developing a perfect diet that you can only stick to for a few days at a time isn't helping you reach your goals, especially if you rebound and things like that. So tiny changes that you can keep up for 10 years are gonna lead to a much bigger impact than trying to design this perfect diet. But just the word in diet, or the word diet itself, take its power away, you know, like, so your diet is just the way that you're eating. Everyone is on a diet, if you wanna look at it that way. So here we see this would be an example of someone's diet, their typical day. All right, so foods contain nutrients. So we eat food, right? But the goal is to make sure we're getting the nutrients, right? So that's why you need a diet that has getting foods from different food groups because every food group is gonna offer different nutrients and things like that. Could you survive on a single food substance for your entire life? Well, I guess it depends on what you consume. But the reason that we build a diet is because the nutrients. But we don't eat nutrients, right? We eat foods, so we have to make sure that we build a diet where we're eating the foods that we like to eat and want to eat and we can eat for the long haul. But we have to make sure that those foods are giving us the nutrients that we need at the same time. So here we just see some examples about how if you were gonna eat some pomegranate seeds and tomato and salmon, each of them would be offering different nutrients up for you. So this is if you're analyzing your diet. This is why it's important to analyze it using a tool like Chronometer or MyFitnessPal or these different things. Because if you analyze your diet, then you can see which nutrients you're getting too much of, for example, and then maybe cut out some foods that are giving you too many of those, right? If you are getting too many calories, then you cut out the maybe some sauces and sodas or things like that, cream and your coffee that are just giving you really nothing but calories. But then if you're getting too little of a nutrient like magnesium, then we gotta find some foods that offer magnesium and we have to find a way to add them to our diet. So that's kind of the beauty of understanding that foods contain nutrients. Achieve the goal of healthy eating, meal planning. So this is, I think that one of the best ways to get on a healthy diet is really to find four or five or six meals that you really enjoy that are very nutrient dense, that kind of check all the nutrient boxes and then maybe build your diet around those. Now a variety is important, we'll talk about that, but so if you have several kind of go-to meals that you know are gonna give you a lot of nutritional value, then you have like some discretionary calories and you have some meals where you can have a little bit of wiggle room. Personally, that's what I like to do. So I probably have, I have more than four or five, but I have about a dozen different meals that I know I know the nutritional value of these meals and I will add them into my week in a way where I know I'm getting, you know, like if I know I'm gonna get some salmon once or twice a week and I know I'm gonna get a high fiber meal here and there and here. So I like doing that. So if you build your diet, then you can have, you can have meals where you just eat whatever. Maybe you have a really good structured breakfast and a really good structured lunch and then for dinner, you just eat whatever your mom and dad or whatever your husband or wife or partner, whoever is making, right, or something like that or you go out to eat a couple of times a week. You know, we generally have like Thursday nights is a night that we just kind of will order in because my wife generally works late on Thursday. She has to get up early on Friday. I take Oliver to his ninja classes on Thursday. So that's just like, you know, so we eat healthy the other times and I'm not saying that what we order won't be healthy either, but just we have a little bit of wiggle room there. That's kind of what I think of when I think I'm kind of planning a diet, not for a day, right? You basically plan a diet over days or weeks. And then if you do that, you also can prep your meals and meal prepping is a different thing, but it's really important. If you look at if convenience and cost are two reasons that people choose to eat the way they do, well, if you prep your meals, then you can save money and you can save time. So the nice thing about meal prepping is, so like I'll just have like a couple of protein sources that I'll cook a week's worth of for myself. I'll have a whole bunch of chicken breast, maybe some ground beef, whatever. And then I can, knowing that I can use that to make all manner of different meals by using different sauces and adding different vegetables and these kinds of things. Same thing, my wife chops up a bunch of different vegetables so we have, so we know we have these protein sources, we know we have these vegetables and we can just mix and match them in any way that we want. So combination of planning your meals, planning your diet and then prepping accordingly can really be a lifesaver. Okay, so the goal, eating pattern that provides needed nutrients without excess energy or calories. So we want a diet that is giving us enough of the vitamins and minerals and the macronutrients and everything that we need without having too much of other things. So we don't want to be overfed or have over nutrition and we also don't want to have unnutrition. We want to find that balance right in the middle. So how do we do that? We choose a combination of foods that deliver a blend of nutrients and then we'll talk about variety here in just a moment. So food is medicine, diet and prevention of chronic diseases. Absolutely, right? Depending on the disease, we know that poor diet impacts your risk of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, which leads to things like strokes. We just, diabetes is a real clear example as well. So it says here diet planning can help prevent serious chronic diseases. So one example would be the dash diet. The dash diet stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension and it's a lower sodium, higher potassium, diet that's been clinically shown to lower blood pressure. So planning a diet around the dash diet is a great way to control blood pressure or prevent you from developing high blood pressure, which is a killer. Same thing with if you need to lose weight to decrease your risk of diabetes or you need to lower your blood sugar, then planning a diet that will help you control your blood sugar is a great idea. All right, so can you think of some common chronic diseases? I just mentioned a lot of the big ones there. Scientific evidence shows that which chronic condition might be prevented in some individuals through a better dietary intake? So you see these options here and take a moment, but the answer is type two diabetes. So let's go back, type one diabetes is an autoimmune condition, asthma, similar, it's immune system disorder, multiple sclerosis, also an autoimmune condition. So diets can impact those things for sure and no doubt about it, but you can prevent, so with diet and lifestyle factors, you can prevent type two diabetes in almost everyone. It's a great example. So you see here, it says type two diabetes affects approximately one of every 10 adults in the US. First of all, it's not just adults anymore, right? 100 million Americans right now are diabetic or pre-diabetic and almost the huge majority of them are type two diabetics. So that means that 100 million people either have diabetes now or are on the path to have it within five years. This is an unacceptable number for sure. So it's more common now than previously due to a higher rate of obesity and then diet changes too, I think. So, but weight gain is definitely a big part of it. So I've seen case reports of seven year olds, 10 year olds, 12 year olds that already have it. Like when I was in college, we would have called type two diabetes adult onset diabetes. We can't even do that anymore because people are getting it so much earlier. So now it's just called type two diabetes. Great example of, I mean, some studies show that, if you take a 30 minute walk every day and you decrease your sugar consumption, just a couple of things like that, lose five to six percent of your body weight and you can virtually eliminate your risk of getting type two diabetes, it's pretty unbelievable. And if you get it, as long as you haven't done a whole lot of damage, if you're, you know, you're recently diagnosed with type two diabetes, I like to say you can put it in remission, right? And I say remission because you, you know, you can't get rid of it and then just go back to the way you were eating and living and expect it not to come back. But if you make changes, you can remove your risk or you can bring your blood sugar down to normal levels. You can remove the need for medications and these types of things but you have to continue with those diet and lifestyle factors. That's why I always say remission, not cure. Okay, a case study activity. Again, you'll have to go through this yourself but just real quickly, Alicia is a 19 year old college sophomore. She has pre-diabetes, meaning that she doesn't have diabetes yet but her blood sugar is climbing. She's having a harder and harder time controlling her blood sugar, which means her body is needing more and more insulin to control her blood sugar after meals. The doctor has advised her to lose weight to decrease the likelihood that her condition will progress to type two diabetes. Alicia tells you that she doesn't know how to begin to make diet changes. You ask her if she would like to begin with one meal at a time and Alicia responds that lunch is the most difficult meal for her because she buys lunch at the Starbucks on campus. I gotta get a drink here. Alicia tells you that she is always in a rush and hasn't taken the time to look over all the menu choices. So every day she orders a chicken and smoked bacon panini with a salted caramel cream beverage. Alicia also buys a package of shortbread cookies to go. So you can do the actual whole product and you can go to their website and you can build her a healthy meal. I don't go to Starbucks often but I used to work a lot at a scooter. So I'd sit and use my computer. They're not work for them. But I know there are better options than these types of things at a place like Starbucks. So let's say if she needs to lose weight and control her blood sugar, there has to be something better than shortbread cookies to take with her when she leaves and the salted caramel cream beverage. Some of those things have like 70 grams of sugar in them. So she switched to a lower sugar beverage and took something healthier with her to go and maybe removed the bacon or some condiments from that sandwich. She could transform this meal. She could cut the calories in half easily. She could cut the sugar down by 80% easily. So play around with it. You can go to the menu and give her some different options but there definitely are healthier things that she could do with this meal. And then if you could convince her to prepare her lunch instead and take like a chicken salad with her to school and water or tea, boom. She loses weight, blood sugar goes down, she's no longer pre-diabetic. So you can play around with that. And that's that you can use this as well. Okay, this is what the key of this chapter to me, this and kind of portion sizes. So the six diet planning principles and I'm gonna add a seventh one just so you know. So we have adequacy. So an adequate diet, balance, energy control. So correct number of calories. Nutrient density, moderation and variety. So let me start with the one I wanna add to the list. So there's seven in my opinion and the seventh is going to be sustainability. As I get older, I just, I realize how important sustainability is. You always want the perfect diet, perfect exercise program but the perfect thing to do is what you actually can do. If you design a perfect diet and you just can't eat it, it's never gonna help you. If you design a perfect exercise program that you can't really do, it's never gonna help you. Think about New Year's resolutions, failing and these kind of things, right? I'm gonna exercise six days a week and I'm gonna eat perfect. And then by February, you're back to your old ways. Well, so tiny changes that you can actually do for a year or five years or 10 years are much bigger deal. So if you can make your diet 10% better and you can stick with it, it's gonna be the best thing for you. So a sustainable diet, not what's the perfect diet, not the perfect lifestyle choices. What is the best diet that you can easily sustain? So sustainability is to me the most important one, honestly. All right, so let's look at these different terms here and we'll cover them all. So adequate, an adequate diet means, so I like to look at adequacy and moderation first. So an adequate diet means you're getting enough energy and enough nutrients. So adequacy is that floor. Are you getting enough vitamins, enough minerals, enough fiber, enough essential fats, enough of everything? So an adequate diet means you have no deficiencies. A moderate diet, so let me read the definition. Consumption of nutrient dense foods most of the time and consuming foods that are not nutrient dense but may be enjoyable only occasionally. So the whole point with moderation is to make sure you're not getting too much of things. So if you have an adequate diet, that's the floor. You're meeting the minimums. A moderate diet means you're not overdoing things so you're not getting too much of anything. Too many calories, too much sugar, too much of a certain vitamin and mineral, et cetera. So an adequate diet is the floor. A moderate diet is the ceiling. A healthy diet's in the middle there. And that's kind of what balance is. So a combination of foods for adequate nutrients and calories. So you're getting foods from all the food groups and you see some examples there. One type of food will not provide all the nutrients. So a balanced diet is whatever your diet looks like, if it's adequate and it's moderate, then it is balanced. That's why a vegan diet, a keto diet, a paleo diet, any diet you wanna talk about, a Mediterranean diet, all of them can be balanced. When you put the diet together and you formulate it are you getting enough of everything without getting too much of anything? That's what a balanced diet is. So adequacy is the floor, moderation is the ceiling, balance is in the middle. Number three, energy control. Are you eating the right number of calories? And it's not always the same. If you're pregnant and needs to go up, if you're trying to gain weight, it needs to go up. If you're trying to lose weight, it needs to go down. But energy control means you're eating the number of calories that you need. So you see there, your basic energy needs, which would be your basal metabolic rates, your resting energy expenditure, plus your calories from activity. So if you're an athlete in training, you're gonna need more energy. If you broke your leg and you're sitting on your hind end for a month, you're gonna need less energy. So energy control is, are you eating the appropriate number of calories for your needs and your goals? Number four, nutrient density. So nutrient density is, so let me read this and I'll kind of expand. Variety and amount of nutrients in relation to calorie content. So a nutrient dense food is gonna offer a lot of nutrients per calorie. The opposite would be empty calories. Think about like a soda. A soda is empty calories. It's basically all calories, no nutrients. Something like, well, if you're looking for nutrient density, like the most nutrient dense food in the planet is usually organ meats. So like liver, like liver, calorie per calorie, gram per gram, beef liver is gonna offer more nutrient density than anything else. So generally organ meats are number one. Seafood's a number two. Then you get into things like vegetables and fruit. So, cause even vegetables versus fruit. There's nothing wrong with fruit, but vegetables are gonna be more nutrient dense than fruit because they both offer a lot of vitamins and minerals and fiber, but vegetables generally have less calories. So nutrient density is, how many nutrients can you get per calorie? And that's where I think if you're gonna design a healthy diet, I've already mentioned there's no such thing as a single perfect diet and everyone's diet's gonna look different. But in the end, however you're eating, you want a nutrient dense diet. Most of the foods that you eat should offer a lot of nutritional value per calorie. Not saying everything you eat should be low calorie, but there should be, when you're eating something, it should give you more than calories and that's the idea of nutrient density. So if you plan a diet, you can get all the nutrients you need or almost all the nutrients you need from the basic foods you're eating. Generally speaking, a diet with whole foods that are less processed is going to be better from a nutrient density standpoint, eating things like seafood and fruits and vegetables versus junk food. All right, I already mentioned moderation, so the last one on here is variety. So selection of foods from each food group and varying choices within groups. So what is that, why is that important? If you have a lot of variety in your diet, first of all, each food group is gonna offer something. You're gonna get, there are nutrients you get from maybe grains and fiber you get from grains that you don't get from meat and there's calcium you get from dairy that you don't get from fruit, for example. So if you're eating a variety of foods from different food groups and then within those groups, there's some variety. That's gonna, the key with variety is it keeps you from getting too little of some things but also too much of some things. Right, if the only fruit you eat is whatever, grapes let's say, well you're gonna be missing out on the nutrients and the phytochemicals that you get from other fruit. Then you also might reach a point where you're getting too much of something. Let's see, let me give you an example. Broccoli, nothing wrong with broccoli at all. But broccoli is a goitrogen it's called. So some of the nutrients in broccoli could maybe impair iodine absorption, different things like that. So if you to see pounds and pounds of raw broccoli every day, that might not be a great idea. But if you mix up the vegetables you eat, nothing wrong with eating broccoli but you also eat other vegetables and different colors of fruits and vegetables then you're less likely to get too much of any one thing and too little of any one thing. So that's what variety, think like different colors, different types of meat, different types of dairy, different types of fruits and vegetables, et cetera, et cetera. All right, so if you can create a diet no matter what it looks like and that's what I said earlier, there's no perfect diet but if you can create a diet that is adequate, moderate, balanced and varied that has nutrient density and energy control and is sustainable, then you've created a perfect diet for you and then you eat that diet, you see how you look and feel and perform and if you're looking and feeling and performing the way you want to you stick with that diet. If you're not, you tweak little things and see if things make you feel better or worse and you do that for years, you're an experiment and you keep changing variables and try to find what works best for you. All right, which diet planning principle encourages choosing foods from all major food groups as well as choosing multiple different foods within each food group? So that would be variety. Different colors, like I said, eating seasonally is another really good thing to do. If you eat the produce that's in season which is gonna change with the seasons and times of year, that would lead to some variety as well. All right, which food combination best represents dietary balance? Remember we said a balanced diet is both adequate and moderate. So we've got, they all have mac and cheese. This one has a roll and low-fat milk. This one has broccoli, potatoes, banana water. You can read them, but I would say it looks like B, right? Because we're getting some grains with the macaroni. We're getting some dairy with the cheese. We've got veggies, veggies, fruit, water. Yeah, that one looks like the most balanced diet because you're getting a lot from different groups. Okay, application, diet planning. So understanding diet planning principles, I basically just said that. For adequacy, which combination of foods for you provides enough of all the nutrients. If you put your diet into chronometer, that's C-R-O-N-O-M-E-T-E-R, that's my favorite. Or my fitness pal. Is it spitting out that you're getting all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need? That would be an adequate diet. Balance, which foods work together to provide just enough but not too much of any one type of food or food type? Energy control, which foods taken together provide the right amount of calories. So like if you're, like when I'm planning a diet for my day, I basically plan everything but breakfast first and then I see where I'm at with my macronutrients especially, where I'm at with protein, where I'm at with carbs, where I'm at with fat and calories. And then whatever I've left over, that's what I put into my breakfast. Because I generally like to eat more later in the day, like after I've lifted weights and these kind of things. So it's like, if I have 500 calories to play with, then my breakfast will be 500 calories. If I need to make sure I get more protein in it, that's what I'll do. If I have more calories to play with, then I'll have a bigger breakfast. That's kind of what works for me from an energy control standpoint. That's another nice thing about just having meals you eat over and over, it's really easy to just plug and play them. Okay, nutrient densities, which foods provide multiple valuable nutrients? So I think about things like salmon is going to provide the omega-3 fats that you're not going to get from other types of meat, for example. Organ meats are off the charts. Seafood, really hot and nutrient dense as well, generally speaking. Moderation, does the diet contain mostly nutrient dense foods and moderate portions? Am I not going over? Too many calories, too much of something. And then variety, does the diet include different types of foods from all major food groups? So if you can answer all these questions, then your diet looks really sound. Helping individuals with diet improvements. So when you're building a diet, then my diet may not work for you, right? So I generally, I like a diet that's lower in carbohydrates. It works really well for me. Basically my favorite foods have a lot of protein and a moderate amount of fat in them. So it's really easy for me to stick to a diet that's lower carb. For other people, that's not true. Their favorite foods have a lot of carbohydrates and things like that. So yeah, there's lots of, when it comes to planning meals, you have to consider all these types of things. Obviously if I was going to design a meal plan or a diet for a vegan, I wouldn't use the foods that my diet is based around. Things like eggs and stuff. So everyone's unique. Consider their traditions. So what kind of foods? So basically how can you improve the quality of someone's diet? The best thing to do is to take the diet they already have and make small tweaks. Sorry, can you add some vegetables here? Can you remove some trans fats here? This type of thing. So don't make somebody eat a diet that's completely new and foreign to them and they're less likely to stick with it. Access to food, what foods can they eat? So if someone, like if I have a student at the college that's asking me about their diet and they have the meal plan, they live in the dorms and they have the meal plan, like okay, let's see what they have to eat for whatever meals they're eating on campus and design the best diet we can with that in mind and then they can add other foods to it to figure out the rest of the diet. Food preparation skills. So if you're asking someone to be a chef and they only have a microwave, that's not gonna work. Possible health needs. So again, if they're pre-diabetic, I'd probably put them on the lower carb side of things, for example, if they're trying to build muscle, they need more protein, et cetera, et cetera. And then food preferences. You want people to like what they're eating, right? So I don't, you know, every meal that I eat isn't a flavor explosion, it's not an experience, but I enjoy every food that I eat, which is why I can stick with it and I go weeks at a time without straying from my diet at all because I enjoy what I'm eating, right? So if you made me eat a diet that was completely different, I would have a lot harder time. It would take a lot more willpower to stick with it. So I'll apply meal planning principles by making small changes to usual and familiar meals. That is the best thing to do, right? So I'll give you some examples that I do. So cereal, I like cereal, but I now eat a high protein cereal instead of a normal cereal from the grocery store. And I use macadamia in that milk instead of regular milk. So I'm getting more of the healthy monoinsaturated fats, less saturated fat. So I still eat a bowl of cereal, but that bowl of cereal is lower insaturated fat, higher in healthy monoinsaturated fats, and higher in protein and lower in carbs than a typical bowl of cereal. But it's still a bowl of cereal. That's an example of something I do. I like making wraps and or tacos or things like that. So I use a lot of tortillas. So I now use more of a whole grain tortilla that's much higher in fiber. So I've increased my fiber intake without changing my diet at all. I just changed the tortilla that I wrap my food in. So those are simple, simple changes. Okay, maybe changing if you're trying to lose weight and you really like ground beef, we'll use a lower fat ground beef, going from 80, 20 to 93, seven or something like that would be another really good example. So meet someone where they're at, make the tiniest changes you can to get the biggest improvements. Okay, so the discussion here, you got a lot of work to do on this one, but you can certainly do this, but can you design great diet? I think doing it for yourself is the right thing to do, but if I see some examples here, can you create meals that are adequate, variety, all the things we talked about. I mean, it says to do a vegetarian meal and ethnic cuisine and then one that requires little to no cooking. These are just good practice for can you design healthy meals? Go ahead and do that. Then it says to have somebody else assess it. Obviously, we're not together here for this. Just a reflection from this experiment experience once you've done it. Did you draw on your own lived experiences for this activity? I think you should. What are the healthiest meals that you can design that are in those different categories for yourself? The things that you'd eat. Did you find the background information from the textbook useful? Gotta go through that. Did you feel that you could be creative during this activity? So I think being creative is great when it comes to meals. Can you get, because variety is important and enjoying the food you eat is important, so all good stuff. Okay, a debrief, diet planning principles. What other diet planning information from chapter two would inform you so you could help others? Again, you gotta go through that yourself. Then we have the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Just so you know, this is the Dietary Guidelines for Americans as a report that comes out every five years with recommendations that are used to make our food patterns. So you've probably never seen the Dietary Guidelines, but the information from the guidelines created the food pyramid before, and then we have the plate. So the USDA food patterns, they're now called, but we went from the food pyramid to the Choose My Plate, but the information that went into this came from those Dietary Guidelines. All right, based on what you have learned, if you could help anyone plan meals that might improve their health, who would you want to help? So this would be, you know, I love doing diet analysis projects and certainly do it on yourself or you could do it on someone else, right? When I took a nutrition class years ago, I did a diet analysis project and I did it on the father of a friend of mine that was interested in losing weight and getting healthier because he had some disease risks. So I met with him, designed a diet for him. He stuck with it. He lost 26 pounds. I remember it clear as day and then he had a heart attack, right? So this is a crazy story, but so the first person that I ever helped with their nutrition had a heart attack, but the doctor said that he would have died if he hadn't made all those positive, because he was exercising too. He made all these positive health changes. He lost 26 pounds and he would have died. The doctor, the court doctor doesn't know, they don't have crystal ball, but the doctor said he would have died from this heart attack if he hadn't made all these health improvements. So I'd like to think that I played a role in saving someone's life with a nutrition, with a diet analysis and a diet plan. So this stuff matters. It really does, right? I've changed my diet and I've lost a ton of weight and I'm exponentially healthier than I was a few years ago. So you go through this and if you can't think of anybody else, do it for yourself, but maybe for your parents or a friend or someone that needs your help, you may as well take the tools you're learning in this class and help someone. Maybe you can save someone's life too. All right, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, like I said, it's every five years, so they'll do it again in 2025. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, healthy eating patterns. So our diet should be built around a variety of vegetables from all subgroups, dark green, red, and orange, beans and peas, starchy vegetables. So I agree with a lot of that. I think that I do believe in animal products, but for reasons we can talk about throughout the semester, but I think that 60% of the volume of your plate should be produced, you know, basically at all times, eating different colors, that's the whole variety thing we've talked about as well. Starchy vegetables. We'll talk about the role of carbohydrates as we go. You know, I'm a little biased because I think that the average American needs way too many carbs, and we'll talk about why, but I'm not advocating keto diets for people or things like that either. Fruits, especially whole fruits, what that means is don't rely on fruit juices, right? Eating an apple way better for you than apple juice, right, apple juice is, yes, it has some nutritional value, but from a sugar and fiber standpoint, it may as well be soda. So fruits are better for you than fruit juices. Grains, at least half of which are whole grains, so obviously you have more highly refined grains and you have whole grains. Whole grains are gonna be better for you because they have more nutritional value, but the big thing is the fiber, right? Making sure you're getting enough fiber. Fat-free or low-fat dairy, including milk, yogurt, cheese, and or fortified soy beverages. So the dairy is recommended because of its calcium and its nutrient density. They recommend the fat-free or low-fat because of the avoidance of saturated fat, but I think that a full-fat dairy can be just fine for you as well. It depends on your diet and your needs. A variety of protein foods, including seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, legumes, which are beans and peas, and nuts, seeds, and soy products. So you've gotta make sure you're getting enough protein. I think that if you're gonna design a healthy diet, if I'm designing anyone's diet, I start with protein first, get all their protein needs met, and then figure out where the energy should come from, the carbs and fat, right? Because proteins are building blocks. So get all those, and then whether someone's lower or higher carb or fat, really just it's personal preference to me after that. And then oils. Obviously you got the oils that everyone agrees are good for you like your monounsaturated fats, and we'll do a whole chapter on fat coming up. Resources for diet planning. So the USDA food patterns, again, that would have been the food pyramid, then we got the plate, and these are the food groups. Healthy eating patterns are flexible to accommodate an individual's personal, cultural, traditional preferences and financial resources. So again, each of these circles is gonna be different size for different people and different needs. Again, if you're an endurance athlete, very physically active person, then you're gonna need maybe more things like starches. Maybe you're gonna eat more fruits and more grains. If you don't move a whole lot, maybe you're a power lifter instead of a marathon runner, you're gonna eat more protein, and you're gonna need less of the starches and things like that. And then maybe you're lactose intolerant, or you have a milk protein allergy, so you can't consume dairy, so you have to use dairy alternatives. This is just the place we start, excuse me, place we start, but everyone's diet's gonna look a little different. Depending on individual calorie levels, there are recommended daily amounts of foods from each group. Let me show you that on this slide. So it isn't just your standard food labels gonna say based on a 2,000 calorie a day diet, which is perfectly fine, but not everyone should eat 2,000 calories a day, some less, some more. So I like this table here. You gotta, which ballpark should you be in? Like see, I consume 2,800 calories a day. So the 2,000 calorie a day diet isn't a good recommendation for me. I need more of these different things than some of the consumed 2,000 calories a day. And that's because I'm a large man, I'm very physically active, I lift weights about 10, 11 hours a week. So that's gonna be different, but if I'm cutting or trying to lose weight, then my numbers would drop and so would the recommendations. So make sure you can go to the website that myplayed.gov, make sure that you're looking at the correct eating strategy for you based on calories and goals and these kind of things. All right, this is just, this is showing what we saw earlier, this is a typical meal. So at the end of the day, if you design your meal, your meal plan for tomorrow, then when you input everything, would you have all the nutrients you need? The proteins, the carbs, the essential fats, the vitamins and minerals and all that, would you have everything without having too much of anything? And that's what meal planning is all about and we've just spent all this time talking about it. All right, so then you can do this, but go ahead and, we don't have a group of students or anything, but if you wanna practice this at home, you have someone that has a 1,850 calorie a day diet, can you design a good meal for them? So go ahead and do that. Serving sizes, though this is important. So because if the governments recommend, you consume a certain number of servings of something, well, what is a serving? This helps you with portions for sure too. So what is one cup from the fruit group? So it'd be one cup of raw or frozen or cooked or canned fruit, but a half a cup of dried fruit would count as a full cup because you've dehydrated, you've removed all the water. So a cup of fruit isn't always a cup of fruit, right? So a half a cup of dried fruit would be equivalent to a cup from the fruit group. Same thing with vegetables. You see a vegetable group, one cup of raw or cooked or canned vegetables would be a cup, but leafy green vegetables, it takes two cups, right? I mean, a big pile of spinach isn't really that much spinach. So it takes two cups of a leafy green vegetable to equal one cup from the vegetable group. One ounce from the grain groups. So you see one slice of bread, one ounce of ready to eat cereal, or half a cup of cooked rice or pasta or cooked cereal. So those would be equal to different amounts of grains. One ounce from the protein food groups. So we have one ounce of cooked or canned lean meat, poultry or seafood, one egg, one tablespoon of peanut butter, a quarter cup, and that's not as big as you think it is, right? I always think a tablespoon, remember you make sure you're using an actual measuring tablespoon, not just a tablespoon from the silverware drawer. I was doing that where I was getting a teaspoon of, I thought it was a teaspoon of something, ended up being about five and a half teaspoons by the time you actually factored it out. But a quarter cup of cooked beans or peas, half an ounce of nuts or seeds or four ounces of tofu, each of these would be the equivalent of one ounce of protein. And then remember, and then one cup from the dairy group, a cup of milk, a cup of yogurt, a cup of fortified soy or other plant beverage like the macadamia nut milk that I drink, one and a half ounces of cheese or two ounces of processed cheese. So what do these mean? So you go back to, again, I'm 2,800. So if I need, so you see like 10, so you see like the different, I need two and a half cups of dark green vegetables, seven cups of red nor and all these kinds of things. So that's the stuff that we're gonna need using these recommended serving sizes. All right, finally, we're looking at the nutrition facts panel, which has been updated recently. You'll notice that they've added, at the bottom here, they've added vitamin D and potassium. I'm really glad they added potassium especially because it is one of the new trends that it's hardest for people to find. We need a lot of it and the average American definitely does not get enough of it. So let's look at the different parts of the nutrition facts panel. So start at the top here, serving size in large, bold type. Serving sizes reflect portions typically eaten, not those recommended. So always make sure you look at this. You can really get confused by this. If you go to, if you go by a, I remember seeing a blueberry muffin once at a gas station, a serving was a third of the muffin. So if you just looked at it and you looked at the calories and the carbs and all that, you're like, oh, not so bad until you realized that what was in that container was three servings. You have to triple all those numbers. So make sure you're not confused by those. Make sure you look at a serving size. And if you're gonna eat more or less than the serving size, that changes everything else below it. Next, we have killer calories or calories per serving in large, bold type. So again, that's calories per serving, not per container. I had a student once that was eating, I think it was, man, what was it? It was a brittle, like a brownie brittle. And she was talking about how she was shocked how low the calories were. But she was looking at the calories per serving and thought it was the calories per bag. I think there was, I don't remember, it was years ago, but there was like eight or 12 or 16 servings in the bag, way more calories than she ever imagined because she wasn't looking at it correctly. So it's calories per serving. Then we have the daily values. So you're gonna see there, your total fat is usually broken down into, you're gonna see saturated fat and then also see trans fat. You might see more. Like if a food has a bunch of mono and saturated fat, it'll probably add it there. So you might see other types of fats, but you're generally, you're definitely gonna see saturated fat and trans fats under the total fat. Then we have cholesterol, sodium, always gonna see that. So you can monitor your sodium intake. Then notice carbs. You have total carbs, but then you have dietary fiber and you have total sugars and added sugars. So this will help you make decisions like so some foods are naturally gonna have a lot of sugar, but some foods are gonna have a lot of sugars added to them. What else? If you're looking at net carbs, if you're trying to be on a lower carb diet, net carbs would be your total carbs minus things like fiber and minus things like sugar alcohols. So this food here has 37 grams of carbs, but if you subtracted those four grams of fiber, there'd be 33 net carbs. What that means to you? Then you have protein and then underneath it, added sugars are listed separately. So again, we'll talk about how the government recommends how little added sugar you should eat. Then the next column, nutrients required for daily values reflect nutrients of concern listed in actual amounts and percent daily values. So remember the percent daily values though, it's gonna warn you on the bottom is for a 2,000 calorie a day diet. So if you're eating less or eating more, keep that in mind. So you see vitamin D, calcium, iron and potassium in there. Then lastly, a footnote explains the percent daily value which I just mentioned. It's based on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. So if you're eating 2,500 calories a day, these percentages are not gonna be right for you. You always gotta keep that in mind. Nutrition facts label. So serving sizes, they reflect typical eating patterns. Serving sizes are similarly similar products can differ. Again, that's, yeah, you look at like cereal, a serving of one cereal is a cup, one's a half a cup, one's a third a cup. So you gotta always gotta check these things. They can be all over the place. I saw like pickles at the store and the serving was three quarters of a spear. So the pickles were in these spears and it was only three quarters of one of these spears was a serving. All right, one time I saw a container of olives. One and a half olives was a serving. I don't know what you're supposed to do with the other half of the olive, but always be keeping an eye on this. A lot of times you're gonna see serving sizes that are smaller because they're trying to mask the fact that the food probably has a lot of sugar or sodium or something in it. So they, I don't mean, I can't say for sure that's why they do it, but it reduces the sticker shock when you first look at the label. So just always be checking the labels. Okay, summary, did you notice the absence of packaged foods in the meal planning slides? Again, whole foods are usually gonna be better than all the processed foods for sure. Fewer processed foods and more whole foods is best. However, understanding basic meal planning principles promotes the best options in any environment. So again, you can, I could go to a convenience store and I could get, I do this like if I'm traveling or something, I go to a conference. I can go to a convenience store and I can build the diet that at least hits my macronutrients and gets me in the ballpark of a healthy diet. It's not a diet that I wanna eat every day, but it meets my needs, right? So keep that in mind. Once you understand the rules, there is some wiggle room there. Meal planning principles are a broad guide as long as you hit those major components we've talked about. The USDA has developed meal planning tools and examples based on food groups, individual energy needs, budgets, cultural traditions and more. And you still see like your food pyramids and you'll see like different food pyramids for different cultural groups, that's really cool. Great, good idea to look at those. And then food labels can certainly assist you. Now you have to understand another thing though about food labels. They can be pretty terribly inaccurate. They can, a food label basically has to be within like 20 or 30% of reality. So you could be designing a perfect diet based on food levels and still be eating too many calories. Again, it's not your fault. It's just there is this kind of labeling error that can occur there.