After all these years of inactivity, I have decided to reactivate my blog, mainly because I want to share this 30-day experiment with you.
I am now a Culinary Arts instructor, and one of the lecture classes I teach is Nutrition. For over a year I have been teaching about the USDA Food Guidelines and My Plate, and also about the obesity epidemic in the United States, which is highly affecting our health and the health of our children.
So I decided to practice what is being preached by the Nutrition experts in our country and analyze whether this is a viable plan or not.
Do you know about My Plate? Are you familiar with the current guidelines and how they translate to our day-to-day life? Can our population understand and follow these guidelines, or are we required to have a PhD in science and technology to navigate through the information? Will I get hungry or will I get all the nutrients I need (and improve my energy level) if I follow My Plate?
At this moment, as you can see, I have more questions than answers.
Here are the steps I have taken so far:
1. Go to Choose MyPlate website and understand My Plate: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
2. Entered my personal information and desired goal, and obtained the suggested My Plate Daily Plan for me. (you can easily do that yourself, it is free). Printed the PDF file, and it is not attached to my fridge :-)
3. I clicked on SuperTracker and Other Tools, and then clicked on the highlighted link to SuperTracker, it took me to this other website where I can log the foods I eat, my Physical Activity, and other tools, all linked to my Daily Plan. https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/
4. I created a profile and am getting used to the interface. It has a database with lots of foods, but you can also create your own recipes and favorites foods. It is not super intuitive and easy, but it is not that bad either, once you get used to the flow of entering the information.
Things I like about it so far:
Tomorrow, 07/13, I will start following the Daily Plan and logging my food. I will not attempt to make too many changes to my daily routine at once, because after all this is the USDA recommended plan for the average American, right? So I should be able to incorporate it to my busy life-style.
I cannot promise to write everyday, but I will do my best to keep you all posted.
Wish me luck! (actually, for all of us)
Chef Alex
I am now a Culinary Arts instructor, and one of the lecture classes I teach is Nutrition. For over a year I have been teaching about the USDA Food Guidelines and My Plate, and also about the obesity epidemic in the United States, which is highly affecting our health and the health of our children.
So I decided to practice what is being preached by the Nutrition experts in our country and analyze whether this is a viable plan or not.
Do you know about My Plate? Are you familiar with the current guidelines and how they translate to our day-to-day life? Can our population understand and follow these guidelines, or are we required to have a PhD in science and technology to navigate through the information? Will I get hungry or will I get all the nutrients I need (and improve my energy level) if I follow My Plate?
At this moment, as you can see, I have more questions than answers.
Here are the steps I have taken so far:
1. Go to Choose MyPlate website and understand My Plate: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/
2. Entered my personal information and desired goal, and obtained the suggested My Plate Daily Plan for me. (you can easily do that yourself, it is free). Printed the PDF file, and it is not attached to my fridge :-)
4. I created a profile and am getting used to the interface. It has a database with lots of foods, but you can also create your own recipes and favorites foods. It is not super intuitive and easy, but it is not that bad either, once you get used to the flow of entering the information.
Things I like about it so far:
- it breaks down the food you eat per MyPlate food group and it makes it easy for you to follow your progress throughout the day.
- It is easy and fast to add items or remove items from a meal.
- You can create multiple profiles under the same account, so that more than one family member is following my plate, you can have a central point for the recipes and favorite foods for the family.
- There is not water intake tracking, and that should be part of the daily plan.
- There does not seem to be a link between physical activity and calories burned/calories available to consume.
- Adding new foods is a bit cumbersome.
- When entering Nutrient Contents to a food, the data fields do not really follow the current Nutrition Label format, for example: nutrition labels show Calcium as a percentage of the RDA, but the website asks for mg. So the user has to know that the RDA is 1000mg, and then calculate the percentage to be able to enter that information on the SuperTracker. That is counter-intuitive and complicated.
- I could not find a smart phone app that integrates with the SuperTracker profile. I am still looking for it, it is not a definitive conclusion. But if the app exists, it is not obvious on the App store.
Tomorrow, 07/13, I will start following the Daily Plan and logging my food. I will not attempt to make too many changes to my daily routine at once, because after all this is the USDA recommended plan for the average American, right? So I should be able to incorporate it to my busy life-style.
I cannot promise to write everyday, but I will do my best to keep you all posted.
Wish me luck! (actually, for all of us)
Chef Alex
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