“You are what you eat” is one of those sayings that we’re all familiar with, and it has a ring of truth when one realizes how important daily nutrition is to sustaining long-term health. Still, most of us only have vague notions of how to put good nutritional advice into practice.
Information about good and bad foods, and about whether to avoid carbohydrates and/or fats, is readily available via the Internet, but it is often conflicting and confusing. Are all fats bad? Or is a low-carb diet the best regimen? What kind of diet is appropriate if faced with diabetes, or heart disease?
On this episode of Kentucky Health, Dr. Wayne Tuckson talks to a dietitian with Louisville’s public health department about the recommendations for a balanced, healthy diet and the changes in government guidelines for daily nutrition. The discussion also covers nutrition for persons with specific illnesses, and how a healthy diet can help your budget.
Andrea Doughty is a nutrition specialist and the diabetes program coordinator with Louisville Metro Government’s Department of Public Health and Wellness. She is a registered dietitian with a graduate certificate in dietetic practice from Western Kentucky University.
Doughty acknowledges that our current age of information overload can make dietary and nutrition advice hard to trust and to understand. She instructs those who use the Internet for research to access websites from organizations that are not trying to sell a product or push a specific diet or nutritional program.
The American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association operate thorough, trustworthy sites for persons seeking diet and nutrition guidelines to help with those specific health concerns, Doughty says. For most of us, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Choose My Plate website is the de facto choice for good information and advice.
From Pyramid to Plate, and What It Means
A couple of years ago, Doughty says, the USDA revamped their iconic Food Pyramid model to create the My Plate diagram. The goal was to give consumers a more detailed and balanced visual representation of how to plan food choices.
“We went from a diagram that kind of gave us a false idea that there was one food group that was more important than the other,” Doughty says, recalling the pyramid structure of years past that limited foods such as poultry and fish while overemphasizing carbohydrate-rich breads and rice. “This takes those same kinds of ideas and morphs them into a graphic that is something we relate to automatically, a plate, and it doesn’t give any one food a priority over another one.”
The My Plate message, Doughty says, is that we should strive to get a variety of foods in every single meal. We should eat some major food groups more than others, but none are completely off-limits. Just as important, Doughty says the new model recognizes that no single food group exists above all others as being essential to superior health.
“A red flag for a diet that might not be the best for you, is something that says, ‘Well, if you eat this food, that’s the key to health.’ You know, ‘If you eat nothing but protein, your life’s going to be perfect,’” she says. “And that right there, any kind of diet that promotes that kind of message is probably one you have to look at with scrutiny.”
That being said, Doughty reaffirms that fruits and vegetables offer the most benefits across the health spectrum. They are recommended for persons who are at risk for developing diabetes because they have naturally occurring sugars rather than processed or refined sugars. They are also famously low in fat and high in nutrients.
Furthermore, cooking meals from scratch using fruits and vegetables is much less expensive than heating up or buying prepared meals, and Doughty says that it does not take much time or innate skill to become a good cook – just a willingness to learn and practice. She mentions the online book “Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day,” which offers recipes that mainly derive from fruits and vegetables.
Doughty says that following a diet similar to the “Good and Cheap” book fulfills nutritional requirements, builds good eating habits, and saves money. “It’s very easy to eat a healthy, nutritious breakfast for less than a dollar,” she says.
Fats and Carbs: What’s Good, What’s Bad
According to experts like recent Kentucky Health guest Dr. Gilbert Friedell, diabetes is a growing public health emergency in the commonwealth. Getting full nutrition and maintaining a healthy diet are crucial for persons who want to avoid becoming diabetic, Doughty says, but persons who already have diabetes should follow a more restrictive diet that limits their carbohydrate intake to regular intervals. This helps to prevent spikes in blood glucose levels, she explains.
The My Plate diagram for diabetics is slightly different than the one for those without the condition. It increases the portion recommendation for non-starchy vegetables, and reduces starches and fruits. However, Doughty says that fruits can still be part of the diabetic’s diet; what needs to be avoided are foods with added or processed sugars.
Another food program is recommended for persons suffering from heart disease and/or hypertension. This plan, called the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, or DASH, focuses on eating habits that lower sodium intake as well as saturated fats. The diet is similar to the famous Mediterranean diet, Doughty says, since it emphasizes lean poultry and fish.
“Fish is really great for cardiovascular health and hypertension along with the DASH diet because it is high in Omega-3 fatty acids, which have been found to be really good for cholesterol control and a good blood-lipid balance,” she says.
For most of the late 20th century, dietitians, nutritionists, and government agencies identified fat intake as the major agent in causing obesity and its resulting health problems. More recently, carbohydrates have been criticized due to their role in raising blood sugar levels.
For Doughty, there are no truly bad carbohydrates or fats – “I wouldn’t even put the cookie into the bad, never ever category,” she says. Still, she explains how whole grains are more beneficial to health than refined starches, in that they contain fiber and vitamins along with carbohydrates. Likewise, she says that olive oil and canola oil are preferable to use in cooking instead of vegetable oil because they are rich in unsaturated fats that have been shown to build “good” cholesterol, which is vital to heart health.
Overall, Doughty says that diet and nutrition should be viewed just as seriously as medicine when assessing one’s overall health goals. As a self-admitted “chicken nugget kid” who gradually changed her eating habits even before she chose her career path, she understands that impressions made by certain foods on us when we’re young can prevent us from taking the necessary steps toward adopting a healthy, nutritious diet. But Doughty advises people to revisit some of their least favorite childhood foods, and to seek out new foods that may appear unappetizing but are healthy.
“Food is very conditional, when you’re experiencing it, there’s a lot of different things that go into that experience,” she says. “When you’re trying something new, make it fun for you, and you’ll be surprised how enjoyable it can be.”
