A Handy Website for Analyzing Your Diet
Prepared by Jim Hicks
After learning the truth about nutrition, you may want to take a look at how you are currently doing relative to things like % fat, grams of fiber, total calories, sodium, cholesterol, etc.
I recommend an excellent site (www.nutritiondata.com) where you can find out a ton of information about thousands of foods prepared in a myriad of ways. A former omnivore, I now try to get the vast majority of my calories from highly nutritious, whole plant foods. Since I occasionally have a little dairy, meat or fish, I don't refer to myself as a vegan or vegetarian. Plus, I don't like the "labels" as they only convey "what I don't eat" instead of the more important "what I do eat."
A word of caution: An estimated 95% of the food items on Nutrition Data are worthless from a nutrition standpoint. As we know, 98% of Americans eat the S.A.D.; therefore, this site helps them sort our the worst foods from the simply "terrible" foods. It helps us truly understand the big picture about what we're eating and how we can improve.
You can join the site for nothing and then you can build your own "pantry" of foods that you routinely eat. I recently analyzed my average daily intake again and came up the following:
 Total Calories = 2405Percent of Calories from fat = 10% (The SAD is well over 30%)Percent of Caloires from protein = 11%Percent of Calories from carbs = 70%Grams of Fiber = 94 grams (The SAD delivers less than 10 grams from whole foods.)Grams of Protein = 81 gramsSodium = 803 milligramsCholesterol = 0.0 milligrams (You don't even want to know what the SAD delivers here)While analyzing my diet, I did some extra calculations out of curiosity and found things like:
Spinach has over 14 grams of protein per 100 calories...compared to 9 and 13 for whole milk and sirloin steak respectively. Information like this might help you to answer that well known question, "Where do you get your protein?"My diet contains a whopping 94 grams of fiber per day; with virtually all of it coming from whole plant foods...the average American gets less than 5 grams per day from these healthy foods.A pear is not just a carb;it is 2% fat and has 1.2 grams of protein. It also packs a powerful 6 grams of fiber per 100 calories, has zero cholesterol, and contains only 2 mg of sodium per serving.On the other hand, the sirloin steak has ZERO fiber, is 45% fat, and contains 302 mg of sodium along with 478 mg of cholesterol per serving.The last time I did this exercise a few months ago, my average fat % of calories was 15%. That inspired me to work on reducing my percentage fat intake to 10% or less...which I have now done. You can learn a lot on this site, but I strongly recommend that you get your nutrition education from the authors in the BOOKS section of Harmony Earth.
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