Friday, October 26, 2007

Vegetables per Day

Fridays are devoted to topics about nutrition

The USDA recommends 2.5 cups for women in the 30-51 age range and 3 cups for men per day. So 2.5-3 cups per day of vegetables. And that's for people who exercise less than 30 minutes per day. Most of us, I think. I know when I was working an ofice job, the most exercise I got was walking to my car - maybe 10 minutes per day.

Being super-analytical, I want to know whta they mean by a cup. Straight from the USDA themselves,

In general, 1 cup of raw or cooked vegetables or vegetable juice, or 2 cups of raw leafy greens can be considered as 1 cup from the vegetable group.

Then there is a handy chart for you to look at that describes what a cup is for various vegetables. You can get there from this link: http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/vegetables_counts.html

The interesting thing about the new food pyramid is that it is customizable depending on your activity level, age and weight. Go to www.mypyramid.gov and click on MyPyramid Plan to go through a "wizard" to help you plan out what you as an individual should eat.

You can build a pyramid plan for each family member if you would like. This seems to be a lot of time to me. And it can be, but if you have no idea what you should be eating and how much, it may be well worth your effort to find out.

2 comments:

info@thebabymarketplace.com said...

Great post! I follow this for the kids, but don't do it for myself ... hmmm

Ms. Anne said...

That's usually how it goes. We often need to make sure we take care of ourselves as much as we look after everyone else.

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