How many times have you abandoned a new program or approach because you broke a “rule” and ate something that you weren’t “supposed” to?

Well, I already screwed up, you might think, so it doesn’t matter now! And maybe you go from having one extra drink at happy hour to a whole weekend of indulgent food and drinks.

Or maybe you don’t even want to try eating a healthier diet, because you know you can’t live up to that stringent vegan/paleo/no-added-sugar diet your sister or friend or co-worker is touting.

This kind of black-or-white thinking drives me crazy! Continue reading “The Good Enough Diet: A Drama-Free Approach to Better Nutrition” >

This week’s Nutrition Diva podcast talks about the recommended intake of omega 6 fats.  How much is enough? How much is too much?

Here’s a guide to the omega-6 and omega-3 content of a variety of healthy foods. Click on any column to sort the list by that value.

Want a food added to the table? Add your request in the comment section and I’ll do my best to add it.

“Eat a varied diet” is a fairly standard piece of advice. The idea is that by eating a greater variety of foods, you’ll be more likely to check off all the nutritional boxes.  But a new report suggests that the enormous amount of variety in our diet may be leading us astray.

When we have lots of different foods on our plates (or on a buffet line), we tend to eat more.  You’ve no doubt experienced this countless times. After eating a bowl of chili, we might feel no desire to continue eating…until a piece of cheesecake appears. Suddenly, we have a little more room.

But we can use this effect to our advantage, by limiting the variety of snacks and sweets that we keep around and increasing the variety of fresh vegetables, for example.

Just for fun, why not take an inventory of what’s in your house right now? How many different types of crackers, salted nuts, chips or other snack foods are on hand? How many different kinds cookies, cereal, muffins, granola bars, ice cream, chocolate, or other sweet treats?  How many types of bread, rolls, tortillas, and other starchy foods?

Now open up that crisper drawer. How many different kinds of vegetables and fruits are in there, ready to eat?  How many different sources of lean protein?

How does the variety (or lack thereof) of various categories of food correlate to your consumption patterns?

If you want to cut down on snacking, try keeping fewer snack foods around. If you want to eat more vegetables, surround yourself with more different kinds of produce.

In this week’s Nutrition Diva podcast, I talked about the concept of protein density and why it really matters.

Plant-based sources of protein like legumes or nuts often contain a lot of additional calories in the form or carbohydrates and/or fats. It can be challenging to to increase your protein intake using plant-based sources without taking in more calories than you need. This is where the concept of protein density can help. 

We can calculate the protein density of a food by dividing the protein by the calories and multiplying by 100.  Foods with a higher protein density provide more protein per calorie. For example, black beans have a protein density score of 6.6, meaning that 100 calories worth of black beans contains 6.6 grams of protein. Edamame, on the other hand, has protein density of around 10. You get 50% more protein from the same number of calories.  (Although the calories and protein will change with the serving size, the protein density will always remain the same.)

Here is a table of some common foods and their protein density. You can sort this list by any column by clicking on the column header.