Confused? Overwhelmed? A simplified guide to a healthy diet

Who knew food could be so complicated?  Look up "apples" on NutritionData, for example, and you'll find over a hundred nutritional facts about them. In fact, you won't find a more complete nutritional analysis anywhere on the web, which is great for those who really want to know what they eat. 

But if you're new to the world of nutrition, all those numbers can be a bit overwhelming.  Relax. You don't need a PhD in biochemistry in order to have a healthy diet! Here's a simple, interactive guide that anyone can use to start improving the quality of their diet.

What does your body need?

At its most basic, a healthy diet is one that gives your body what it needs (and not more than it needs). So the first step is simply to figure out your body's nutritional requirements.  We'll start with the most general need (energy) and work our way down to more specific needs (individual nutrients).

Energy

First off, your body requires energy, or calories.  But how many? This is important to know because eating more calories than you need will lead to weight gain and eating fewer calories than you need will cause you to lose weight. 

How many calories you need depends on your size, age, gender, and activity level. The Daily Needs Calculator will estimate how many calories (kcal) you burn each day, based on all these factors. Take a moment to plug your details into the calculator right now. (When you click on the link, the calculator will open in a separate window so that you can continue reading.)

Is your goal to maintain your current weight? Then you should aim for a diet that contains, on average, the number of calories revealed by the daily needs calculator.  If you want to gain weight, you should eat more than that amount. If you want to lose weight, you should eat less. (For every 3500 extra or fewer calories you eat, you will gain or lose about one pound.)

It's best to lose or gain weight gradually, so I recommend that you add (or subtract) 500 to 1000 calories per day from your total to gain (or lose) one to two pounds per week.

Hint: want to eat more without gaining weight? You can increase the number of calories you burn every day by increasing the amount of exercise you get. Play around with the calculator to see how much you can burn with various forms of exercise.

Macronutrients

Calories are provided by four different types of macronutrients: fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and alchohol.  A healthy diet will include a balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. (Alcohol is optional and shouldn't take up more than 10% of total calories). Exactly what that balance should be is a matter of some debate. Some experts believe that you should eat almost all carbohydrates and just a little bit of protein and fat. Others advocate eating almost no carbohydrates.  As you learn more about nutrition, you might want to investigate the arguments for and against these different approaches further.

But to get you started, a good recommendation is to get roughly half your calories from carbohydrates, about a third from fats, and the remainder from protein. (Count alcohol, if you consume it, as part of your carbohydrate calories.)

In round figures, if you are consuming 2000 calories per day, you'll want to get about 1000 calories (or 250 grams) from carbohydrates each day, 600 calories (or 66 g) from fat, and 400 calories (100 g) from protein.  You can calculate your specific needs based on your calorie intake (which you calculated with the Daily Needs Calculator); you just need to know that carbohydrate and protein contain about 4 calories per gram and fat contains about 9 calories per gram.

Micronutrients

OK, so you've figured out how many calories you need to eat; and you've calculated how much fat, protein, and carbohydrate your body needs. Now it's time to think about the micronutrients, better known as vitamins and minerals.  The Daily Values (DV) for vitamins and minerals provide general guidelines for how much of the different nutrients you need to be healthy.  To see the Daily Values, click on Preference Settings.    You'll see the DV for macro and micronutrients displayed in the center column.

The DV are based on a "typical" diet containing 2000 calories. To the right, you'll also see a place where you can enter in your own values. So, if you've determined you want to eat 1800 calories instead of 2000 calories, you can edit that amount. 

Hint: You can import the values from the Daily Needs Calculator directly into your Preference Settings by clicking on the link in the Calculator. You can then edit them as you like. Click Save to save these settings as your preferences.

Wrap-Up

Now that you know what your body needs--how much energy (calories), carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals, you can use the information you find here on NutritionData.com to help build a healthy diet.

Here's a few ideas on how you can use NutritionData's many tools to improve your diet:

1. Look up any food and see what nutrients it contains (Read more)

2. Compare foods to see which aligns better with your goals (Read more)

3. Analyze what you typically eat to see how it compares with your needs (Read more)

4. Analyze your favorite recipes to see their nutritional make-up (Read more)

5. Find foods that provide more of the nutrients you are missing (Read more)

Questions? Send them to me at monica@nutritiondata.com and then look for your answers right here on the NutritionData blog.