I also said no to cake at the party on Saturday. The definition of moderate is average in amount, intensity, quality or degree. Average and moderate are very flexible terms because they are both determined by context. If you are someone who is in the habit of having something sweet after dinner every night, moderating might mean moving to 5 days a week.
If you are buying banana bread each time you get a coffee, moderating might mean only getting banana bread once a month. It comes down to being fully aware of what you are currently doing and deciding if you are happy with that. These things can all be termed discretionary foods.
Discretionary foods are foods that are not necessary for a healthy diet and contain large amounts of sugar, saturated or trans fats and salt.
Think lollies, chocolate, cake, biscuits, donuts, soft drink, chips. But what about alcohol? What about homemade muffins? What about crackers? It all becomes very grey.
In changing one habit, we have to be careful not to start another unhelpful habit. For example, saying that I am going to reduce dessert and then replacing it with a hot chocolate instead.
Is that a reduction or a deferral? Honestly tracking your current patterns it the key to making change. You need to understand what triggers food decisions and when food choices are happening unconsciously. The very act of tracking can start to make us change, which is not a bad strategy to utilise. I thought that I only drank alcohol on nights per week.
But when I looked back at my previous couple of weeks, it was more like nights a week. So I started tracking and it immediately dropped down to 4 because I was more aware. As we mentioned, there is no right or wrong with how frequently you enjoy a discretionary food. Once you have determined how often you currently have something, the aim of moderation is just to reduce it a bit.
The same way we need feedback on what we are currently doing, we need feedback on how we are progressing. But as we saw before, our memory is not an accurate tool. You need some concrete data to really be able to tell if things are improving. Habit tracking apps can be a helpful way to do this.
It is arbitrary and subjective. And I have science to prove it. In a series of studies published in the journal Appetite, researchers demonstrated that the size of what people generally consider to be a "moderate" portion is highly dependent on how much a person likes the food and how much of it they eat in their everyday life.
Even if we were to ignore research , done on mice at the University of New South Wales, which demonstrated that eating a poor diet that includes things like meat pies, cakes, and cookies even a few days a week can change the balance of gut bacteria and lead to weight gain and ill health, the vast majority of us are not eating kale salads and cooking from scratch Monday to Friday like Miss Universe Australia is.
If you look at a typically Western diet, many of us are eating excessive amounts of cheap, nutritionally-deficient, low-quality food on a regular basis. Over one-third of American children and adolescents eat fast food every day. A study of more than 5, people found that the more variety of foods people ate both healthy and unhealthy , the more likely they were to be overweight and have type 2 diabetes.
The researchers suggested this is because the potential benefits from increased intakes of fruits and vegetables may be outweighed by the unfavourable effects of eating foods containing trans-fat, sodium, starch and refined carbohydrates.
In other words, junk food is junk food even if you eat your vegetables. This is in part because subtle environmental cues around us, such as package size, plate shape, or lighting, can increase how much we eat far more than we realise. My favourite series of studies demonstrating this have been done on movie goers given free popcorn.
Check out my blog post and podcast episode featuring the head of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, Brian Wansink for more on this.
As a health journalist with a chronic health condition which is worsened by unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, I totally understand that the message of moderation and balance can make healthy living seem more attainable. I'm also very aware that our efforts to be healthy can swing us way too far in other direction. Sugar promotes tooth decay and, in the long run, may contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes. Sugar is often found in high levels in food which also contains high levels of saturated fat and salt.
Excess saturated fat increases blood triglycerides and cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart disease and are also risk factors for a stroke. High salt intake is associated with increased blood pressure, also contributing to heart disease. Non-core food is often very energy-dense, mostly due to its fat content 3. Regularly eating this food will increasingly tip you towards unhealthy weight gain.
They have a higher nutrient density, are full of vitamins, minerals, proteins, fibre, unsaturated fats and antioxidants. Eating from these food groups will boost your energy levels, help you maintain muscle and bone strength, promote quicker recovery from illness, keep your skin, eyes, hair and nails healthy, and support all your organs to work efficiently. Some core foodstuffs should not be eaten as often as others, for example we require far less meat or dairy products than we do vegetables, pulses and grains 5.
However, the latter are typically lower in kilocalories and can be eaten in larger quantities to achieve the same energy intake 6. A light amount is great for enhancing flavour, but if your lettuce is dripping in creamy dressing or your lean steak is swimming in gravy, it is definitely something to be eaten in moderation.
The daily outline described above includes a lot of variety, but this is different to moderation. We have thousands of different non-core food products available to us in supermarkets, cafes and takeaways — you could eat a different non-core food every day for a year and not run out of options; so simply consuming different kinds of food each day is not going to cut it.
It is important to include variety in your diet too, for example, biological variety — food which comes from different biological origins. Bread, pasta, crackers, Weetabix , crumpets, flour, cake and biscuits are all wheat based. That is one primary origin. A diet with a wide variety of grains and cereals over a month, might include wheat pasta, rye bread, oats, rice, pearl barley, polenta, quinoa, millet and sorghum.
Then, not only different plants, but different varieties of those plants. Did you know there were once over 7 varieties of apples and 8 varieties of potatoes? Not all of these are available to us in the shops, but you can probably find at least different varieties of most fruit and vegetables with slightly different nutrients and taste profiles. The more variety you eat, the easier it is to obtain all the essential nutrients your body needs, plus lots of bonus antioxidants and other health-promoting compounds.
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