“I’m looking for advice on healthy eating for the whole family — not so much a diet, but more an easy-to-understand guide on healthy eating. If you talk about the food pyramid, can you please explain exactly which foods contain these good and bad ingredients?”
This is a good question — we often forget to get down to basics when it comes to talking about the pyramid.
Basic healthy eating advice for the whole family
When you consider the volume of food you eat, not the weight, you should aim to eat more vegetables than anything else. Choose from a variety of vegetables of different colours, including broccoli, spinach, pumpkin, beans, Asian greens, capsicum, onions, garlic, carrots — to name a few.
The only vegetables you should make sure you don’t overeat are potatoes. Small new potatoes are good, but restrict your intake of deep-fried potato chips, chips and large baked potatoes. Also, when you are baking vegetables, try to use a small amount of oil or dry bake instead.
Raw fruit is another terrific healthy food, and you and your family can happily eat 2-4 pieces of fruit a day for good health. When you cook fruit, such as stewed apples, add only a small amount of sugar or none at all.
Moving up the pyramid, you will find carbohydrates and protein — both equally important, but for different reasons. Protein is necessary for growth and repair, while carbohydrates give us energy. Within both of these, and in vegetables and fruit, are what we refer to as micronutrients. These are vitamins and minerals necessary for every body function. Quality carbohydrates and proteins contain a lot of micronutrients, while poor-quality versions of these foods contain very little.
Quality carbohydrates include grain foods such as: wholegrain bread, rye bread, oats (used in muesli and porridge) brown rice, brown pasta, and bulgur, as well as legumes and pulses such as chickpeas, kidney beans and lentils.
Poor-quality carbohydrates are all through the supermarket in the form of processed breakfast cereals with high sugar content, white processed bread, sweet and savoury biscuits, cakes and pastries, jam and many desserts. With all these foods, the best advice is to eat them sparingly.
Good-quality proteins include lean meat and poultry — such as lamb, beef, chicken and turkey — fresh and canned fish, seafood, eggs, low-fat dairy and soybeans.
Poor-quality protein is determined by the amount of fat it contains or, in the case of processed meat and fish, the amount of fillers and additives used.
Towards to top of the pyramid, but still essential for good health, is fat. Fats are essential for our skin and the membranes around our body cells. They help in the exchange of fat-soluble nutrients and they play a role in protecting and feeding the brain. There is quite a distinction between good and bad fats.
Good fats are found in olive oil and olives, avocado oil and avocadoes, nuts and seeds — and the oils produced from them — and coconut oil.
Bad fats are the solid fats found on meat, chicken skin, butter, cream and cheese. Referred to as saturated fat, they increase the risk of heart disease, are very high in energy, and are often converted into body fat.
Full-fat dairy is an excellent source of calcium, as is low-fat. If you have children under the age of 5 years, you should give them full-fat dairy. After that time you can give them reduced-fat milk or skimmed milk.
At the very tip of the pyramid are treats. These are positioned at the tip to show that they should be eaten in very small quantities. Treats are occasional foods such as cakes, biscuits, pastries, chocolate, soft drinks and all the other foods that taste good but offer little in the way of nutritional quality.
If you have any questions concerning foods and where they belong in the food pyramid, ask our Food Coach.
What’s in your fridge? Check out Judy Davie’s latest fridge audit.
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