March is National Nutrition Month®, an opportunity to learn more about making informed food choices and developing healthful eating and physical activity habits.
In recognition of the annual campaign by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Sarah Beatty, clinical dietician at WMed, recently took the time to share a few tips centered around this year’s theme, “Food Connects Us.”
“It's going beyond the idea that food nourishes us. It's that connection of sitting down and making a meal together,” Beatty said. “Food is social. Whatever your goals are around nutrition, we don't want to lose that social aspect with food. Food brings us together.”
With that in mind, here are Beatty’s top tips on how food not only connects us to our health, but how food connects us to culture and our loved ones:
Connect with food:
- Get creative in the kitchen and try different recipes. Eating a variety of foods can provide different nutrients our body needs for good health. A variety of colors on our plate from fruits and vegetables have different health benefits for us, such as red colored fruits and vegetables are great for heart health and blue/purple-colored fruits and vegetables are great for brain/memory health.
- Go to your local farmer’s market and talk to the farmers about how they grew and/or processed their food or start your own garden at home or at a community garden and get hands on experience with the food growing process. This can help us appreciate the work it takes into bringing food to the table.
- Preparing food at home is also a great way to get kids involved with cooking and can lead to healthy relationships with food throughout life.
Explore the connection between food and culture:
- Experiment with different cooking techniques and add different ingredients to your meals. Learning how to make food delicious and nutritious is a great way to stay consistent with healthy eating throughout life.
- Try new cultural foods and flavors with friends and family and share some of your own favorite food traditions. Learning about how and why different foods are prepared in different ways can connect us more to the dish, the person who prepared it, and learn how it can affect our health.
Connect with nutrition across all stages of life:
- Nutritional needs change throughout life. A growing adolescent typically needs more calories than a fully developed healthy adult. Older adults should pay attention to how much protein they’re eating to help decrease the risk of muscle loss that can happen as we age. Individuals who are pregnant need more folate to decrease the risk of birth defects. All individuals should aim for at least 20 grams of fiber per day to help with digestion, cholesterol, and blood sugar control.
While it can be intimidating to try new foods and new ways of preparing them, Beatty encourages exploration, as it often takes 20 to 30 tries of a food item to determine if we like it or not.
“Our taste buds are very surface cells. They're constantly changing,” Beatty said. “I always encourage my patients, just stay open minded to food.”