Chapter 2 – Planning Healthy Diets
2.1 Introduction and Learning Objectives
What makes a diet healthy? Is it low-carb, plant-based, high-protein, organic, gluten-free, or something else entirely? With so many nutrition messages competing for attention, it can be difficult to know what healthy eating really means.
Each of us might picture something different when we think of a healthy diet, and if you travel around the world, you’ll find even more variation in how people define this term.
Humans are remarkably adaptable eaters. As omnivores, we can obtain nutrients from a wide variety of foods and dietary patterns. Around the world, people thrive on diets that differ greatly in their ingredients, flavors, and traditions.
In this chapter, you will learn about the nutrients found in food and the tools nutrition professionals use to evaluate dietary patterns. While food plays important social, cultural, and emotional roles, it must also provide the nutrients needed to support growth, health, physical activity, and disease prevention.
VIDEO: “A Diet for a Healthy World” by the World Health Organization (June 2020) (I:39 minutes)
Chapter 2 Learning Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
- Define basic nutrition concepts and explain how nutrition influences health, wellness, and chronic disease risk.
- Describe the factors that influence food choices, including biological, social, cultural, economic, and environmental influences.
- Identify the six classes of nutrients and explain how nutrient recommendations are established using the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs).
- Evaluate food and nutrition information by interpreting Nutrition Facts labels and applying principles of healthy diet planning.
- Describe the evolution of dietary guidelines and food guidance systems and explain how they support healthy food choices.
attributions
This section is an adaptation of “Introduction to Designing a Healthy Diet” in Nutrition: Science and Everyday Application, V. 1.0 by Alice Callahan, PhD; Heather Leonard, MEd, RDN; and Tamberly Powell, MS, RDN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Consumes both plants and animal foods.
Carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, vitamins, minerals and water.
