Monthly Health Articles Archive

Practical tips for healthy eating

In late January Kossuth Regional Health Center hosted a men’s health fair and one of the topics that we continued to revisit throughout the evening was eating a healthy, well-balanced diet.  We all know we’re supposed to eat more fruits and vegetables, but sometimes it’s a challenge to make it happen.  Here are some practical tips to help improve your eating habits.

Eat as many different colors of food that you can.  If you rule out candy and junk food, you’ll find that most of the color on your plate comes from eating a variety of fruits and vegetables.  Try eating red peppers, green beans, yellow pears, orange carrots, blue berries, white potatoes and purple cabbage.  Counting colors instead of calories may help you to hit the recommended number servings of fruits and veggies per day, a goal most of us could improve on.

Be aware of the affect beverages can make in your overall eating plan.  Start by looking at your intake of carbonated beverages.  If you drink two or three regular sodas a day, you’re adding lots of calories to your diet with no nutritional benefits.  Even fruit juice or energy drinks can be very sugary and high in calories.  Milk is a good option, or make water your drink of choice and limit alcoholic drinks to one or two per day.

Snacking smart can also help.  It’s important to be conscious of the choices we make everyday.  If you don’t take the time to stock up on good snacks, it’s much more likely that you’ll end up eating something out of a vending machine or grab whatever is most convenient.  If you keep healthy snacks around, such as almonds or other nuts, bananas, cut up veggies like carrots and peppers or even the 100-calorie snack packs, you’re more likely to make a good choice.

Make healthy meat choices.  Whether it’s on the grill in the summer or part of a hearty stew in the winter, meat is a big part of most men’s diets.  Pay attention to the wording on packages or labels to choose the leanest cuts of meat that are lower in fat.  For beef this includes rounds, chuck, sirloin or tenderloin.  Lean pork can be found in tenderloin, loin chops or leg and for chicken the leanest choice is white meat from the breast with no skin.  When buying ground meat, go for 90 percent lean when possible.  Portion size is also a key piece of sticking to a healthy eating plan.  Your serving size of meat should be about the size of a deck of cards. 
 
These are general tips for healthy eating, but everyone has different tastes and those requiring specialized diets due to a health condition may need the help of a dietitian or diabetic educator.  For those looking to generally improve their health and eating habits, however, this is a good start to eating better and feeling better.

-Dr. Burt Bottjen is a family physician at Kossuth Regional Health Center