Have a good feel for how to evaluate the nutritional content of almost every food you eat on a daily basis

At this point in the semester, you should have at least a rough idea of what a healthy diet looks like, and you should have a good feel for how to evaluate the nutritional content of almost every food you eat on a daily basis using the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (Links to an external site.).

With this knowledge base, you are going to take a close look at your own diet and you are going to make recommendations for changes to your diet. Specifically, you are going to track the nutritional content for all of the foods you eat over a one week period (including supplements like vitamins), and you will keep track of the calories you have consumed AND the calories you have burned using the spreadsheet below.

There are MANY websites and apps that provide these features easily (and for free). You are free to use the app or website of your choice (e.g. fitbit or the Apple ‘Health’ app), however I recommend Cronometer.com (Links to an external site.) because it is very user friendly and provides nutritional summaries of your diet in a user friendly manner (see the file below which shows the nutritional content of the foods I ate for breakfast and lunch one day – it also shows that I ran for 30 minutes).

Sample Cron-o-meter Data

After a one week period, you need to document your weekly nutritional activity. The best way to do this is print off screen shots from Cronometer.com (Links to an external site.) of each of the 7 days you keep track of your diet.

The second part of the assignment (~3 pages, times 12 pt., double spaced) is to summarize your diet and recommend specific changes. Identify areas in your diet that are too rich and too weak in nutrients and suggestions for modification. For example, you might find that you aren’t getting enough B12 so you need to eat more leafy green vegetables, or you consumed more calories than you burned, so you need to exercise more and cut back on the Ben & Jerry’s. You will submit your formal report at the end of week seven.