Tag Archive for: course-NRS_420

My meal for today consisted of the following:

Breakfast:

-2 pieces of Orowheat Country Potato Toast and 2 pieces of  Laughing Cow Swiss Cheese  (Fat: 10g// Na: 650 )

Lunch (Sharky’s Wood Fire Mexican Grill):

-Chicken Breast Half Power Plate with Mexican Rice and Grilled Vegetables (Fat: 10.1g// Na: 1391.7 mg)

Dinner

-Habit Charburger and 1.5 size order of fries (Fat: 62g// Na: 2370 mg)

Based on my diet for today, I think I will have a difficult time adjusting to a low fat and low sodium diet because most of the foods that I enjoy eating are dependent on fats and sodium. Also, being from a Filipino culture, most of our dishes are high in sodium and fat. Therefore, the taste would just be different and maybe difficult to adjust to.

I had planned on tracking my food for today, September 8th, as I kept forgetting to take photos of my meals over the last few days and thought it would be nice to add some photos to the post. Then I started thinking about it and to get a realistic view of what I actually eat I decided to analyze what I ate yesterday. I try to be pretty conscious of what I eat and yesterday wasn’t necessarily a “bad” day but I was at home studying with not much food left in the fridge so I ended up snacking for lunch instead of prepping a healthier meal.

I plugged my meals into the USDA’s SuperTracker website to get a good analysis of my nutrient and calorie intake. Some foods were a little difficult to input, but I did my best to reconcile the nutritional information of what I ate with the options they had available on their site.

This is a summary of my meals from yesterday:

Breakfast: Quinoa sauteed red bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms topped with sheep’s milk feta and a boiled egg

Lunchtime Snacking: Seedless green grapes, carrots and white bean hummus, TJ’s flattened bananas, and TJ’s thai chile and lime cashews, TJ’s mango icecream bar… not the best lunch

Dinner: Rice noodles with broccoli, onion, and mushrooms in a garlic, ginger, soy sauce. Apfelshorle to drink (sparkling water and apple juice).

Looking at my daily food group targets I don’t think I did a bad job:

I went slightly over for my fruit intake but the majority was whole fruits. I also went over for my veggie intake which I think is great. I almost hit my protein target and was under on my grains target but feel I had plenty of fiber.

I was significantly under on my dairy but I thought I would have hit my calcium and B12 needs with other food groups. Unfortunately I was under the target in both of these nutrients. I usually snack on more cheese, eat meat a couple times a week, and have quite a bit of fortified almond milk so I hope this isn’t an issue. It would be interesting to track my intake over an extended period of time to see if I hit the targets.

Now for the heart healthy diet… I went over the limit on both saturated fat and sodium intake!

My overall fat intake wasn’t too bad. It made up 34% of my daily calories, largely in part to my large snack of cashews which I definitely don’t eat on a regular basis.

My saturated fat was a bit high (13% of my total calories). There is a lot of information that has recently circulated about cooking with olive oil at high heat so I’ve tried to start cooking more with coconut oil and ghee or butter. Researching more about different types of oils and how they are affected when used for cooking has been on my to do list for awhile. Regardless of their safety when heated, I should be conscious of the amount of oil I use when cooking.

I was also over on my sodium intake but thankfully not by too much. I typically don’t cook with a lot of soy sauce but I do use salt and love salty cheeses like feta. Despite this I did go on a long run yesterday and think I sweat out my fair share of sodium in the heat. I also try to stay away from processed foods and know that many are prepared with large amounts of sodium.

I think following a heart healthy diet or any kind of restrictive diet would be difficult. I love food and tend to let myself eat what I want as long as it is in moderation. However, I definitely can’t say I always moderate myself appropriately, especially when studying or writing a paper

Thankfully there are many tools available that can help an individual monitor how they eat and exercise and how it affects their health. I know a large part of keeping myself active involves setting goals and tracking my workouts. It can be very motivating when you’re able to track your progress and see improvement.

Today, only by luck, I consumed a low salt and low fat diet, which is not necessarily normal for me. I love the taste of salt, and prefer it over the flavor of sugar, so I do find myself searching out snacks and foods on the savory-salty side when given a choice. Today I consumed a scrambled egg/tofu/zucchini breakfast with a side of potatoes. In order to check my salt intake first, I used the www.heart.org website to evaluate my breakfast and used their sodium tracker form. The scramble had 105 mg of sodium. If I had used a salt substitute, it would have been 75mg. The potatoes I prepared had four shakes of the salt shaker=40 mg of salt. For lunch I had a salad with salad dressing. The label indicates another 30mg of sodium, plus www.fatsecret.com indicates 16mg of sodium from the salad itself.. For a snack I had 3 cookies at 150mg of sodium each.Since I plan to have the same salad for dinner, my total sodium for the day would be 1787mg of sodium, under the recommended maximum amount of 2,000mg/day. This is fortunate since I try hard to keep my sodium intake as low as possible. I also looked into my fat consumption. The recommended allowance is 78 grams of fat per day. I came in at 55 grams, even including my cookies! If I were to try and reduce these numbers, I would first try to educate myself in finding healthy alternative substitutes. In the past I have enjoyed using different spices and herbs, and for the fat substituting healthy fats (coconut, olive oil) for bad ones. If I were to make cookies, I could also substitute apple sauce for the fat. This option actually tastes good! I think these kinds of adjustments are ok as I like to experiment with ingredients, but if I were to eat out more often or if someone else cooked, I would probably be in trouble. To monitor one’s sodium and fat intake, it takes diligence and awareness to track amounts and to adjust accordingly. At least it looks like I am on the right track, however too bad I like smoked salmon so much. From hereon I will need to be more conscious of how much I consume of it, as it is full of sodium. Maybe preparing smoked salmon myself from fresh salmon and liquid smoke would be better, and eliminate the sodium.

Sodium Content                    Fat Content

Scramble w/coconut oil:                          105mg                                   7g

Potatoes w/coconut oil:                             40mg                                 14g

Salad Dressing (x2):                                   60mg                                   14g

Salad (x2):                                                    32mg                                   n/a

Smoked Salmon (in Salad x2):              1100mg                                  5 g

Cookies:                                                     450mg                                   15 g

TOTAL:                                                      1787mg                                  55g

I picked a day when I had my regular meals to evaluate my diet. I like to use Choosemyplate.org website because it provides many options of how to analyze the intake of nutrients and calories. Here is what I had on that day:

Meals (click – it’s a link)

Next, I looked at the food groups to see if I had adequate amounts of grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, protein, and oils. This break down also allowed me to see how much sodium and fats were in my meals that day:

FoodGroupsMaryna (click – it’s a link)

This website allowed me to create a nutrient report to see a little bit more detailed report on all the nutrients. I could also see all the minerals and vitamins I consumed. This report provided the information about the status of intake of each category: sufficient, insufficient, or excessive amount.

NutrientsReportMaryna (click – it’s a link)

The most convenient feature of this website is that I can click on each nutrient and see which particular food item contributed to the excessive amount of my sodium, or other mineral/nutrient intake. For instance, when I clicked on sodium, I realized that my mashed potatoes and ham contributed the most to the excessive amount of salt during that day. They also give recommendations about how to reduce the sodium.

SodiumIntake (click – it’s a link)

Next time when I buy ham, I will look at the label and chose a low sodium kind. I will also bake my potatoes and add no salt.

I had too much saturated fat and was able to see that it was the cheese that caused the excessive amount. Next time I will chose reduced fat kind of cheese.

Saturated fat (click – it’s a link)

Choosemyplate.org is a very convenient website that I recommend to all the patients who are struggling with planning their meals. It can be very frustrating and confusing for people to plan their meals. This website is a great resource, which also gives you an option of tracking your activities and see how balanced is your intake and expenditure of the calories. I hope you find it useful, too! Thanks.