Eating Smart: Navigate the Chaos of Nutritional Advice

Every person working on improving their health inevitably studies something about nutrition at some point of the journey. And runs into a Pandora chest out there in the Internet. I don’t think there is a more controversial lifestyle-related topic than what we should eat. People get bombarded with offerings of the best diets, pills, supplements, foods to avoid, magic tricks of timing your meals or drinking concoctions to “speed up metabolism” and god only knows what else.

Navigating in this pile of misconceptions, ill-intention marketing and just blatant lies is no joke. However, there is actually not much magic in basic principles of healthy eating, and I am going to share several concepts that are good for most conditionally healthy people, backed up by science and proven to be the most balanced in terms of risks and effectiveness.

The first concept I’d like to mention is a Healthy Eating Plate. This concept was created as a replacement for food pyramids used earlier. It is very simple, visual and easy to follow. Also the fact that a very similar findings were made by multiple researchers in several countries proves its scientific value. You can find two slightly different versions of it at myplate.gov and https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/healthy-eating-plate .

Basic principle is the following:

• About a half of your plate should contain multi-colored vegetables and fruit

• A quarter is complex carbs: whole grains, potatoes, pasta, bread, etc.

• And the remaining quarter is lean proteins, animal or plant-based.

• The drink of choice should be water (tea, coffee are fine too)

• Use healthy oils in moderation. Limit butter and avoid trans fats.

This said, it does’t mean every meal should look like this. The important part is that in the long run your overall dietary pattern has these proportion of nutrient groups. For example, if you like to have yogurt and croissant for breakfast, you don’t have to freak out about squeezing a bucket of veggies in there. Compensate for it in your other meals: more plants for lunch and dinner, while limiting bread and dairy. And in the end of the day your plate is gonna be balanced.

Here are a couple tips for portion control.

1. Use a smaller plate. When the plate looks full our brain registers it as lots of food, even though the actual amount might not be large. The same amount on a dinner plate will be registered as a fine dining kind of portion that assumes there should be many of those :)

   
   

2. Use your hand as a measuring tool. 

   • A palm for protein (both diameter and thickness)

   • A fist for a serving of veggies or fruit

   • A cupped hand for carbs

   • A thumb for fats (oils, nuts and seeds)

Try it out and stay tuned!

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