Heart-Healthy Diet
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:
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.
