Choosing Healthy Snacks

Incorporating snacks into your diet can be a healthy way to keep from getting too hungry in between meals. And choosing those snacks wisely can help add nutrients to your diet, rather than just empty calories. Some ideas for healthy snacks include:

• Whole pieces of fruit. Try to remember to grab an apple, banana, pear, or orange on your way out of the dining hall to have as a snack later.
• Crackers or pretzels with peanut butter. The protein in the peanut butter will help you stay full longer, and both of these foods will store for long periods of time to just keep on hand when needed.
• Applesauce cups can be an easy and tasty way to get in another serving of fruit as a snack. And you don't have to have a refrigerator to store applesauce if you buy the pre-packaged variety.
• Dry cereal stores easily and for long periods of time as well. Cereal can also be a good source of whole grains and certain vitamins. Make sure to look for whole grain varieties when purchasing cereal. The ingredients should list "Whole grain" or "Whole Wheat" as one of the first ingredients.
• Trail mix again is easy to store and is a great snack to keep you full until your next meal. The nuts found in trail mix contain healthy fats and many needed nutrients like vitamins and minerals. And if the trail mix contains dried fruit as well, that counts towards your daily fruit needs.
• If you do have a refrigerator to store perishable items, keeping yogurt cups on hand is a good idea for snacking. Choose low-fat or fat-free options to cut down on extra saturated fat.
• Carrots and hummus is another great snack idea if you have access to a refrigerator. The carrots will add vegetables to your diet and the hummus adds protein.

It's important to remember that snacking can fit into your daily requirements! A common misconception is that eating late at night can cause weight gain, which may prevent people from snacking after dinner. But it is not the timing of when we eat that causes weight gain, it's the balance of calories over the entire day that influences our weight. If snacking late at night causes you to consume more calories than needed, then weight  gain will occur. However, if you are hungry and haven't met your daily calorie needs, snacking will not cause weight gain. So if having a snack helps you focus on what you're working on later at night, then pick a healthy snack to have. Getting a sense of your daily needs and requirements will help you figure out if snacking can fit into your diet. As mentioned in an earlier post, try using the USDA's SuperTracker tool to track your calorie needs and balance your healthy snacks. 

Dietary Guidelines Decoded

            Have you ever wondered where nutrition recommendations come from in the United States? And who changed the famous Food Pyramid into the plate we see now? The answer to both of those questions can be summed up by looking at the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 

      The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are published every 5 years by a diverse faculty of scholars and contains the most up to date nutrition recommendations. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans contains recommendations ranging from serving sizes of foods to alcohol consumption to vegetarian diets. If you're interested in looking at the full document, here's the link!! It is 112 pages though, so let's look more closely at some important information and tools that will be helpful to you when trying to make healthy food choices.

      The Dietary Guidelines for Americans contains recommendations for the amount of calories and amounts of each food group you should consume. Let's define those two things. The calories you require each day will tell you how many total calories you should consume from foods to maintain your current weight. Consuming the correct amount of calories is important because you need calories to do things like walking around town, playing tennis, or cooking a meal. You also need calories for your body to perform it's basic functions: like for your heart to beat and your stomach to churn. Too many calories though can cause unwanted weight gain, which if you gain too much extra weight, can be a risk factor for diseases. The other definition to talk about is the amounts of each food group you should consume. Based off of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, there are 5 different food groups: grains, vegetables, fruits, protein, and dairy. Based off your measures, the recommendations will give you how many servings of each food group you should have.

     

      So here's how to personalize the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to your measures. The easiest way if you have internet access is to go to USDA's website called Daily Food Plan. Input your personal measures into the web page and click submit. The following page should summarize your daily calorie needs and specific servings of each food group (colorful chart). If you get good at estimating servings sizes after looking at the chart below, you can use this colorful chart to help guide your choices. If this is your first exposure to food groups, there's an even easier way to help you estimate your food intake. 

    

      The same MyPlate website also has a tool called SuperTracker that does all the calculations for you. Go to the SuperTracker website. Create a profile for free in order to input your age, sex, weight, etc. like you did before. Then under the Food Tracker section, add the foods that you've eaten that day. It will prompt you to enter a meal and amount of food eaten. When you've entered all your food for that day, SuperTracker will summarize the food you've eaten into easy-to-ready information. See the information below to help decode what SuperTracker tells you about your food intake that day.

      The last piece of information that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans helps us with is choosing correct serving sizes of each food. Determining serving sizes is a difficult task, especially considering that most portions served at restaurants or fast food locations can be multiple servings. To learn specifically about each food group's serving sizes, choose a food group on the website and click on the tab called "What Counts as a Cup?" or "What Counts as an Ounce?" That is a lot of information to memorize every serving size for all 5 food groups, so use this helpful chart from Web MD to give you practical ways to estimate serving sizes.

      There are a lot of nutrition resources online, and the MyPlate and SuperTracker resources explored in this post are both reliable sources of nutrition information. I challenge you this week to look at both of those websites, and for one day this week enter the food you eat into SuperTracker. Being able to see where your diet lacks or is sufficient in each of the food groups can help you make better decisions when choosing foods.
    
     Sources: 
    USDA. Daily Food Plans. ChooseMyPlate.gov. Retrieved from http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
    USDA. Supertracker. ChooseMyPlate.gov Retrieved from http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
    Zelman, K. Portion Control and Size Guide WebMD. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/diet/printable/portion-control-size-guide