You might not know what foods you should be eating and how much you should be getting of each. Eat For Health: Australian Dietary Guidelines, is a new informational booklet that provides scientific evidence for healthier diets. It’s full of facts and figures about nutrition, main food groups, water, pregnancy and food safety.
The old nutritional pyramid has been upgraded to The Healthy Food Plate which shows, in a circular diagram not unlike a pie chart, that vegetables with legumes/beans and grains and cereals should make up the bulk of your diet, followed by lean meats, poultry, fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, then fruit and finally dairy. The additional foods that don’t even make it to your plate are things like pastries, sweets, fizzy drink and fried food.
There’s a section in the booklet that looks at appropriate serving sizes of each food group in relation to factors such as age and gender. If you are a male aged 19 – 50, you should get six servings of vegetables, legumes and beans, two servings of fruit, six servings of grains, three of meat and two and a half of dairy.
To figure out how much an average serving size would be, there is a table that uses real-life examples. A standard serving of fruit is 150g, which equates to be the same as a medium-sized apple, banana, orange or pear or two smaller fruits such as apricots.
A single serving of meat could be 65g of cooked lean red meat, such as organic lamb. This section also includes eggs, a single serving of which would be two large ones, or 30g of nuts or seeds.
Eat For Health says its aim is to help Australians make choices that will promote a healthy lifestyle and ensure they are getting the nutrients and minerals they need. The information, which is based on scientific research, is intended to be realistic and practical so the guidelines can be fit into your everyday life.
