Starting a Healthy Diet

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, formulate a healthy diet plan for your heart, diabetic or any other health condition, you’re well advised to be proactive on your own behalf and find out just which foods contain nutrients that help you attain better health. While your doctor will provide general guidelines, such as avoiding fatty foods or including more dairy or produce in your daily diet, you can zero in on the precise foods that are most advantageous to your situation. How? A few clicks on the net turns up the most amazing vitamin information charts which tell you which foods are richest in certain nutrients, most citing the amounts in precise grams or other measurement units.

These charts often include short narratives, including comments such as ‘promotes eye health’, or ‘powerful antioxidant properties’, as well as contraindications for certain conditions. For example, dried fruits contain concentrated doses of certain vitamins, which may seem like a good idea, until you read the caveat in the commentary, ‘diabetics should avoid dried fruits’. This type of vitamin information can prove invaluable and provide an easy way for you to optimize your diet.

How do you find such extensive vitamin information? The first trick to getting quick results is to include the word ‘chart’ as the first word in your search term. For example, ‘chart vitamin information’, turns up results that lead to a comprehensive chart on vitamins, rather than individual vitamins. Many of these charts are quite complete and, as a result, lengthy ” and large. Some are so large, you can crash your word processor if you try to copy and paste these reference materials using that method. (I know ” I’ve done it!) So it’s best to download the page through your browser to save it. Just click on your browser’s ‘file’ option and then click ’save’. You can then specify the directory in which you want to save the page. When you need to refer to the page, open it in your browser window. You needn’t be online.

Grouping your vitamin information in categories of foods is a good way to obtain even more detailed data and may also be easier to manage. For example, if your major area of concern is optimizing your intake of fruits and veggies, you can do two separate searches, one for each. Google ‘chart fruit vitamin information’ for results that point exclusively to charts dedicated to nutrient content of fruits. You can compile an extensive list of vitamin informational references, including vegetables, dairy products, meats, poultry and seafoods. You can even glean vitamin information on seasonings. For example, did you know that fresh parsley is loaded with vitamin A?

It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to gather vitamin information on all of the food groups. All that remains is for you to organize your menus around the nutrients that will do your body good!

It’s not a bad idea for you to compile your results on a spreadsheet, print it out and take it with you to your next doctor’s appointment for approval and discussion. Your doctor may learn a thing or two to pass on to other patients! Charlie Reese likes giving vitamin and astrology advice on his horoscope website weekly