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In January, many people make new year’s resolutions based on healthy eating and how they can sustain health practices around food. Dean Melissa Perry talks with interim Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, Dr. Lilian de Jonge.
Watch the video or read a synopsis below.
How can people make changes in their healthy eating and make it in a sustainable way?
I think the best advice and the easiest advice is to follow the USDA My Plate program. My Plate recommends for each meal fill half your plate with fruits and or vegetables, a quarter of your plate with lean protein—lean protein is fish or chicken or legumes, beans—and a quarter of your plate with grains, preferably whole grains.
Do you have advice on how people can make these changes? How does one go from someone who loves a lot of junk food to making these changes and adapting some of these important practices?
Baby steps—go slow and don't try to go from your holiday diet to the next day a perfectly healthy diet. For one week, increase fruits and vegetables, even if it's not a half plate. Just more fruits and vegetables than you normally eat, and you just built that. Every week you add something else to it and, eventually, that becomes a habit and not a burden anymore.
These days intermittent fasting is all over the internet. Can you tell us about what it is?
Intermittent fasting is, as the word says, alternating fasting and feeding during the day. You have periods where you can eat and periods you can not eat at all. The most common way of intermittent fasting is 8 hours a day of eating—so from 10 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon—and then the rest of that the day you cannot eat, but you can still drink. And it's recommended to drink water and non-caloric beverages.
Is this healthy? Do you recommend it?
I would always check with your doctor or your health care provider first, but it has been shown to have health benefits. Not just weight loss, but also a lowering of inflammation, because you don't have high levels of glucose in your blood for a long period of time, which can delay the onset of diabetes and other chronic diseases. And it's even shown that it improves mental clarity.
Are there any restrictions or conditions that you'd like us to understand better?
I would not recommend intermittent fasting for anybody who needs a lot of energy, such as athletes, growing children, or people with chronic conditions. Like I said before, it's always important to check with your health care provider first before you embark on something like this.
Registered dietitians, nutritionists, and food scientists are always having to explain complicated information about food and healthy eating. What are some of the things that you wish everyone understood about great food choices?
One thing that always bothers me, and I have seen happen a lot, is focusing only on “super foods.” People kind of focus on one specific food that is the “food of the week,” and they have to have it every day. I think it's so important to keep in mind that variety is very important. A super food is very healthy, but if you only eat that super food every day you're missing out on a lot of vitamins and minerals. This also means that because of the variety, it's really not bad to, every now and then, have something that you like [that isn’t packed with vitamins or minerals]. Food should be something enjoyable and not something you should be afraid of.
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