Nutritional Tools For Healthy Diets

Whether you seek to manage your weight or to improve your family's eating habits, you have a number of nutritional tools available to you. These tools can help you with everything from monitoring your sodium intake to making healthy meal plans. Nutrition directly impacts your overall health and daily energy level, as well as your susceptibility to a wide variety of chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes. With nutritional tools, you can learn more about the foods and nutrients your body actually needs and the choices necessary for a healthy diet.

Food Labels

Food labels serve as one of the most essential nutritional tools available to you. Learning how to read food labels, and then consistently reviewing your shopping choices, will help you to maintain a healthy diet. Marie A. Boyle and Sara Long, in "Personal Nutrition," explain that food labels are required to include various types of nutritional information, such as the net quantity of food, an ingredient list and a nutritional facts panel. The nutritional facts panel, for example, can tell you how much saturated fat, dietary fiber and sodium a product contains, as well as the vitamins and nutrients in the product, such as vitamin C, calcium and iron. Learning how to read food labels can help you to monitor your dietary intake of beneficial nutrients and to avoid harmful foods.

Dietary Guidelines

As a nutritional tool, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans can help you to make dietary choices that will benefit your overall health. Paul Insel, R. Elaine Turner and Don Ross, in "Discovering Nutrition," explain that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) jointly release these dietary guidelines every five years to help promote health and reduce the risk of disease. James L. Hesson, in "Weight Training for Life," states that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasize fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat or fat-free dairy products. Other suggested foods include lean meats, beans and nuts, fish and poultry, eggs and other foods low in unhealthy fats, sodium and added sugars. These dietary guidelines can help you to build a diet full of nutrient-rich foods.

MyPyramid

Available online at MyPyramid.gov, MyPyramid serves as a nutritional tool that will help you translate the Dietary Guidelines for Americans into an individualized eating plan for you and your family. Boyle and Long recommend using the MyPyramid because, they say, "you can determine the right amount of foods to eat to meet your personal energy needs and promote a healthy weight in three easy steps." These steps include estimating your daily energy needs, building a daily eating plan and letting the pyramid guide your food choices. Insel, Turner and Ross also suggest using MyPyramid, explaining that the tool also guides portion choices, encourages eating in moderation and suggests physical activity for overall health as well. A daily tracker even allows you to monitor your dietary intake over time.