How much food?
This should be a simple question, but it isn’t. What we should eat has been clearly defined and how much energy we need is also easy to find out. However, combining these to say how many calories should come from certain types of easily identifiable foods - well that is a mission.
I’m on that mission but so far I’ve failed to find a satisfactory answer.
OK, in the west we generally classify food into five categories:
Starchy foods (bread, cereals, potatoes, pasta, etc)
Fruit and vegetables
High protein foods (meat, fish, beans, pulses, nuts, seeds, quorn, eggs, etc)
Dairy products (milk, cheese, yoghurt but not butter or cream)
Fatty and sugary foods (butter, cream, cakes, crisps, chocolate, etc).
So how much of your energy should come from each of these types of food?
Well, it’s not that simple to work out actually.
Percentages of how much of each type of food you should eat are generally only given for the three macronutrients - carbohydrates, proteins and fats. I can’t find them given for the five food groupings. According to the BUPA website (which I’m assuming is reliable), this is where we should get our energy from:
Carbohydrates - 50% of energy (40% from starch and 10% from sugars)
Proteins - 15% of energy
Fats - 33% of energy (23% from mono and polyunsaturated fats and 10% max from saturated fats).
I’m not sure where we are supposed to get the other 2% of our energy from.
Now of course the three macronutrients don’t fall nicely into the 5 food groups - carbs would seem to appear everywhere but probably mostly in the starchy and sugary foods; proteins mostly in the high-protein foods and dairy products I would guess; and fats mostly in the high-protein, dairy and fatty foods groups. So I’m non the wiser.
Aside from calorie counting the other method that’s supposed to help us choose what to eat gives the percentage of each of the different food groups we should combine to give a healthy diet. The Balance of Good Health, the UK’s official healty eating guide suggests the following:
33% starchy foods
33% fruit and veg
12% high-protein foods
15% dairy products
8% fatty and sugary foods.
But this isn’t calories, this is portions. If you eat 15 portions of food a day then 5 of them should be starchy, 5 of them fruit and veg, 2 high-protein, 2.5 dairy and 0.5 fatty/sugary or thereabouts.
Now that’s great, except how big is a portion? The only portion that’s ever specified is for fruit and veg which is about 80g. Oh, and a hard cheese portion is about the size of a matchbox. The authors of the Balance of Good Health say that portion size will very from person to person so they don’t feel it would be appropriate to give values (risk of starving large/active people and overfeeding smaller/inactive people). But c’mon, they could give us ball park figures for an ‘average’ person! Most of us have an idea of how close/far from average we are physically.
Take a bacon butty as an example. Is a portion of bacon 2 slices or 4 slices? Is a portion of bread one or two slices? If one slice, then does that mean the bacon sandwich counts as two portions of starchy foods? Most of us would probably consider a sandwich as one portion. It gets even more complicated if you butter the bread as well.
If one of your types of portions is way off what the authors were imagining then this will throw your whole balanced diet out of the window. If you really like cheese you might consider a portion of cheese to be the size of a block of butter, instead of the size of a matchbox. Then where would you be?
Nor can you trust a manufacturers recommended portion size (eg on your packet of pasta, etc) because they want you to eat more so that you have to buy more of their product.
I really don’t think that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here. It genuinely is confusing and I’m going to have to do more digging to see if I can find the answers.