Well, let's continue. What is a healthy diet? You know there's a lot of different dietary
philosophies. The simplest dietary philosophy I would say is to eat food just the way nature
provides them to you. In other words you go to the produce department and you get your
fresh vegetables and fruits. You go to the grain section, you get your dried beans and
whole grains. You go to the dairy department get your low fat dairy products. And you have
your low fat or vegetable protein. So that's what I mean by eating foods just as nature
provides them. Anything that comes in a box or a can, you've got to be a smart label reader.
As Jack LaLanne used to say, "If man makes it, don't eat it." So that's what natural
foods are all about. There are five food groups represented in the government healthy diet
pyramid, five food group pyramid. Those being grains, the grain group which would be cereals
and pasta, bread and whole grains and so on.
The vegetable group would be fresh vegetables.You want to have leafy vegetables. You want to have root vegetables, stalks, all parts of the of the plants. You want green and as many colors as we can incorporate into the diet too. That's another indication that you're getting a good variety in your diet. The fruit group, fresh fruits. Try and go for the ones that are in season. And also the dairy group of course, your low fat dairy products primarily for the calcium. So how many servings do we need for each of these groups? We need six to eleven servings from the grain group. Now that sounds like a lot. It's it's really not. A serving size would be one slice of bread or a half a cup of cooked cereal or cooked grain or one ounce dry. Those are the serving sizes. So we need six to eleven a day from the grain group. From the vegetable group, we need three to five servings. A serving would be a half a cup chopped or one cup leafy raw.
The fruit group, we need two to four servings a day. And again a serving would be one one medium fruit or a half a cup chopped. The dairy group, we need two to three servings of low fat milk, cheese or yogurt. And then the protein group, two to three servings.
Protein group would be meat, fish, poultry, eggs, beans, nuts, and seeds. So how many servings do you need? The that depends of course on your calorie requirement and whether you need to lose weight or not. If weight is an issue, then you want to stick to the lower number of servings, the diet outline. And if you do that, that'll put you in about two thousand calories a day. The upper number of servings that would come out to about twenty five hundred calories a day. So what I'd like you to do is keep a diet diary. Just write down at the end of the day what you had for your meals and the quantities. And do that for a few days. And I think you'll find it's very revealing. You'll find things that you didn't know you were doing. So that's what we mean by a healthy diet as based on the USDA food group pyramid and the five food groups.
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