New US Dietary Guidelines

A simple map to the land of wholesome, by Jane Brody in the New York Times, discusses the new US Dietary Guidelines.

The article begins:

For the first time since it began issuing dietary guidelines, the government offered new recommendations last month that clearly favor the health and well-being of consumers over hard-lobbying farm interests.


The new science-based Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released Jan. 31 by the Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services, are comprehensive, sensible, attainable and, for most people, affordable. They offer a wide variety of dietary options to help you eat better for fewer calories without undue sacrifice of dining pleasure.

Now it’s up to consumers to act on this advice and put the brakes on runaway obesity and the chronic diseases that cost billions of dollars before they kill.

 
The article continues:

Here is a summary of the guidelines, which combine the goals of fewer calories — and especially nutrient-poor calories from sugars, fats and refined grains — with more emphasis on nutrient-dense foods:

• Eat lots more vegetables and fruits, filling half your plate with them.


• Choose lean meats and poultry, and replace some of them with seafood.


• Consume mainly nonfat or low-fat milk and other dairy products.


• Choose low-sodium products and use less salt and salty ingredients in food preparation.


• Eat more fiber-rich foods; replace most refined grains and grain-based foods with whole-grain versions.


• Use vegetable oils like olive and canola oil instead of solid fats like butter and margarine, but remember that all fats have lots of calories.


• Eat out less; cook at home more often.


• Drink water, calorie-free beverages like coffee and tea, and 100 percent fruit juice instead of regular sodas, fruit drinks and energy drinks; limit alcoholic drinks to one a day for women, two for men.


• Eat less and exercise more to achieve a better balance of caloric intake and output.

 Find the full pdf of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans by clicking here.  Want to compare with the local version?  Find the pdf of the Dietary Guidelines for Australians by clicking here.  A blog entry to share with your Home Economics, PDHPE and science teachers; not just for the basic content, but for the implications about the influence of vested interests on public health initiatives.

Cheers

Ruth

Images: my own, using the Hipstamatic iPhone app (see my blog entry about this for more information) and a few moments at a local supermarket.  From memory, John S. lens and Kodot film.

Have you discovered Instructables?

Recently, I needed origami instructions for a dead simple box (a Year 7 class assignment had the class members voting on each other's work, and so each kid needed a box for the raffle ticket 'voting slips').  Googlegooglegoogle and this box from Instructables is perfect - simple, fast, works with any rectangle of paper/cardboard.

Instructables (Make, How-To and DIY), if you haven't come across it, is an almost inexhaustible supply of how-to, from the sublime to the Unusual, and every byway in between.  Here, for example, are some of the links from the home page when I looked at it recently:

• Vertical Garden
• How to make your first real robot
• Iron Man - how to make various kinds of gear from the recent film/s
• Easy origami
• How to make a dog bone shaped cookie cutter
• Mobile veggie garden
• Turn signal biking jacket (with light-up left/right arrows)

And so it goes.  Usually step by step pictures with instructions on the tools and materials you need, sometimes video tutorials as well.  A cornucopia of ideas.

One to share with a whole lot of faculties - Science, Industrial Arts, Design and Technology, Agriculture....

Once again, no pics because Blogger won't play nice.  Sigh, again.

Cheers

Ruth

PS The science teacher who points out the absence of science-y entries on this blog can note that's two science-relevant entries in two days...!!

Better Health Channel - excellent, reliable health info

If your students (or teachers eg. in PE or Science or Home Ec.) are after reliable health/medical information from an Australian source, try the Victorian government's Better Health Channel website.  Fact sheets, patient info, image library, quizzes, medical dictionary, medicines guide, a whole kit and caboodle of stuff that's a safer bet than Wikipedia (where, apart from the issue of veracity, you sometimes run into techno-vocabulary that's beyond the scope of school kids). 

The site will often come up high in Google searches, but why not direct the kids straight to a good site, rather than letting them loose in the wilderness that is health info on the internet?  The language level is accessible and clear for kids to understand, and the fact that it's Australian is important (if you're in Australia) - recipes reflect local ingredients, medicines have their correct local names, further links to support groups etc aren't going to recommend a fabulous organisation in Idaho or Yorkshire...

I was going to include a graphic (the site logo), but Blogger didn't want to play. Again. Sigh.

Cheers

Ruth

The happy life of teacher librarians: spaghetti and meatball cupcakes

A while ago I told one of my Visual Arts colleagues, a cupcake enthusiast, about the blog Not Quite Nigella.  Apart from pretty/elegant cupcake recipes (yup, they're all edible), the blog also includes Halloween ideas (Blood Clot and Brain Cupcakes, anyone?). (Yup, there are links at the end of this blog entry).

For morning tea today, my colleague brought in Spaghetti and Meatball Cupcakes.

What's not to like?  Apart from the fact that your mind and eyes are trying to co-ordinate the apparently impossible/odd....

They tasted great.  In case you wonder, the meatballs are chocolate/coconut confections, the sauce is based on berry jam and the spaghetti is a kind of candy 'string' you can find at Ikea (and it now comes in red/strawberry as well as brown/caramel).  The base cupcakes are vanilla.

And in case you think this is all foolish diversion, it also has relevance to Visual Arts and Home Ec, in relation to perception.  But in the happy life of teacher librarians, it was also rather good fun!

Cheers

Ruth

I've blogged about NQN's fine work before, especially her Halloween cupcakes.

Not Quite Nigella home page
Spaghetti and Meatball Cupcakes
Blood Clot and Brain Cupcakes
NQN also has a bunch of other cupcake recipes, recipes for a wondrous variety of other things, restaurant/cafe reviews and more.

Home cooked vs. takeaway: the dollars and sense of it

Another good article from the Sydney Morning Herald, this time from Good Living: a comparison of a week of takeaway food vs a week of home cooking.  Home and Away, by Kate Duthie.