Dragonfly Tales: 3/13/22

Gini,

My name is Carmen and I'm a registered dietitian working at Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA). Most of my work focuses on helping our 59 food bank partners across the country uplift the health and well-being of their communities, but in honor of National Nutrition Month, I wanted to share a few of my favorite healthy eating tips with you:

1. Eat the rainbow: My go-to method for healthy eating is aiming for a colorful plate. Often the more colors, the more variety. Try to eat a mix of dark green, red, orange, blue, white, and yellow colored veggies and fruits. Different colored foods have different health benefits so eating a wide variety of colors ensures you are consuming enough of each nutrient.

2. Balance your plate: It's important to pay attention to portion sizes too. It's one of the main ways that people miscalculate what they're eating, even when they're trying to be healthier.

To start out, you can use your plate as your guide. Aim for half of your plate to be veggies or fruit, a quarter to be protein (consider plant-based proteins too), and the remaining quarter to be grains (at least half of which should be whole grains). This might mean more produce than you'd expect but your plate will be packed full of nutrients, fiber, and color!

A mother feeds her daughter a strawberry

3. Read the label: I often hear that people are confused about what to look at on nutrition labels. There's a lot you can consider but I focus on three things: serving size, variety of nutrients, and number of ingredients.

Use the listed serving size as a benchmark to understand how much you are eating. For example, if the serving size is one cup and you eat two cups, you are getting twice the calories, fat, protein, and other nutrients.

Generally, 20% Daily Value or more is considered high while 5% or less is considered low. While specific dietary needs differ from person to person, a good rule of thumb is to buy foods higher in things like vitamins, minerals, and fiber while limiting added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium.

I also recommend choosing foods with a fewer number of ingredients. There's no magic number to stay under but if you're comparing two options, the one with fewer ingredients is probably less processed.

I hope these tips are helpful for you and your family. And remember that health is a journey: it's better to make small steps, improving as you go, than expecting yourself to change your habits overnight.

Thanks to supporters like you, the PHA team is sharing important knowledge like this through our programs every day. We are working to ensure that people in every zip code can access good food. Please, make your gift today to support this important work.

Thank you,

Carmen Berry's headshot