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Eating to Prevent Disease

© Stephanie Hembree

It has been said that the best way to treat a disease is to prevent it. There are two reasons for this article. The first is to help you prevent disease. The second is to help you understand what a basic good diet is and help you to understand nutrition. So you can assess your diet and prevent disease. If you already have disease good nutrition is more important. While the nutrition information available is as abundant as it is confusing there are some good places to start. The point of this article is where to find them. Sometimes starting is the hardest part, come along and lets start on your road to healthy eating.

A good place to start is with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Seven out of ten people don't even know these exist according to government surveys. They are seven basic suggestions that are reasonable for the average healthy person. These guidelines are revised every five years. The current guidelines are from 1995 and are as follows:

Eat a variety of foods

Balance the food you eat with physical activity-maintain or improve your weight.

Choose a diet with plenty of grain products, vegetables, and fruit.

Choose a diet low in fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Choose a diet moderate in sugars.

Choose a diet moderate in salt and sodium.

If you drink alcoholic beverages do so in moderation.

For this list as well as an explanation each guideline go to http://www.nalusda.gov/fnic/dga/dga95/co...

Another idea of how to eat a healthy diet comes from the Food Guide Pyramid. The Food Guide Pyramid breaks foods down into the following five categories:

Fats Milks Meats Vegetables Fruits Breads

The reasoning behind this approach is that if you eat a variety of foods you will obtain a healthy diet. The pyramid gives you an idea of how to put the Dietary Guidelines into practice. To see the pyramid and get an explanation of it the categories see http://www.nal.usda.gov:8001/py/pmap.htm

If you prefer a more exact approach you can go to http://www.cyberdiet.com. This web site offers a nutritional profile. You enter some general information like weight, height, gender and activity level and it gives you the total amount of calories needed. It then allows you to customize the percentage of fat you want in your diet. The program then gives you a break down of the protein; carbohydrate, fat, vitamins, and minerals required each day. This site also offers a daily food planner. You plug in the calories required and you can plan your daily meals from their database. The food planner provides recipes and nutritional totals. This is the easiest food planner I have found on the web so far.