Assignment: Analyze your dietary intake

Assignment: Analyze your dietary intake

This assignment is designed to help you learn how to analyze your dietary intake. You can make changes using information found in our textbook, government web sites and/or other credible web sites or sources. Although this is not an exact science, it is important that you track your intake as accurately as possible. You should then be able to identify foods you may want to eat more or less of based on the Dietary Guidelines, Choose My Plate and the Harvard Nutrition Source. Although you may find it challenging, do your best not to alter your eating habits while you are documenting your intake.

Part 1Do your best to track everything you eat and drink for 3 days. Try to include one day that has a different schedule or is less routine (eg: weekend day). Record everything that you eat and drink to include water. Get out the measuring cups and estimate portions. Write down the foods in portion sizes. The following list may help you to determine portion sizes if you are not familiar with portions sizes.

Part 2 Analyze your three day food record using the SuperTracker online tool athttp://www.choosemyplate.gov and respond the following.

Enter your foods in for each day. Share how you did with each of the daily Food Group Targets. Also, how did you do with the nutrients to limit (added sugars, sodium, saturated fat)? Click on the Nutrient Intake Report. Discuss your status for macro and micronutrients. Should you make any adjustments?

3 dayfood log_diet

Which foods do you get most of your protein from? What other protein foods might you try to substitute and why?

Are any food groups lacking in your diet? How might you add more of them into your diet?

What do you think about beverages in your diet? Do they have calories? How much water do you drink in a typical day?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.