Tag Archives: New American Plate

12 Challenges for a Leaner, Healthier You

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NAP-Logo-2-ColorCould you meet the New American Plate (NAP) challenge?

So far over 1,500 people from around the US (and the world) are ready to start. Beginning next week, these Challengers are stepping up to the NAP-PlateNew American Plate Challenge to lose weight healthfully and lower their cancer risk through healthier eating and increased physical activity.

Here’s how it works:

Every Monday for 12 weeks, you’ll get a specific challenge (diet or physical activity) that helps you move towards the NAP way of eating or to the AICR recommendation to get at least 30 minutes daily of moderate physical activity.

  1. Every Friday, you will receive a teaser email to prepare for the upcoming weekly challenge, describing what you need to buy at the grocery store or ways to prepare for moving more.
  2. The Monday morning email will reveal that week’s challenge and you’ll find more specifics, including tips, tools and recipes on the NAP Challenge website to help you meet the week’s goals. Continue reading →

Cancer-Fightin’ Irish Stew

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american-irish-stew 2Meat and potatoes can fit into a cancer-preventive diet, as our Health-e-Recipe for American Irish Stew attests. The secret is in the healthy ingredients we’ve added to yield AICR’s New American Plate proportions of 1/3 lean animal protein to 2/3 plant foods (vegetables, in this case).

By keeping the portions of lean stew meat on the lighter side, there’s more room for the cancer-preventive garlic, onions, carrots, parsnips and leeks. And although white potatoes are over-consumed in this country, usually as French fries, adding some unprocessed potatoes to this dish is a healthy way to honor the Irish cooking tradition that inspired it. Parsley and rosemary infuse this hearty stew with even more phytochemicals and an appropriate touch of green.

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and every day with healthy recipes from the AICR Test Kitchen. Click here to subscribe to our weekly Health-e-Recipes.

Weeniwinks & 100 Years of Nutrition, Part 1: Nutrition Advice

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Physical Culture 300wAmericans have been trying to make sense of food, nutrition and what a healthy diet is for at least 100 years. And throughout, health professionals (and others) have given advice liberally. How has that advice changed?

Certainly, we know much more about diet and cancer prevention. Even just 30 years ago most people did not believe the idea that what we eat would affect our risk for cancer. But now AICR has specific, evidence-based recommendations for cancer prevention.

We also have more powerful information and evidence for how foods and nutrients affect our health in other ways, both short-term and long-term. We understand how to treat diseases related to diet much better – like celiac disease and diabetes. We also know more about nutrition in illness recovery.  And as we learn more about genomics, metabolomics and other omics, we can address individual needs and improve personalized diets for disease prevention.

Yet, even with all the research and new discoveries, we still struggle with helping people take nutrition knowledge and put it into practice on their plates. Today’s barriers to healthful eating include supersized and ever abundant overly processed foods. We advise getting back to basics – eating more vegetables, fruit, whole grains and legumes.

So what might we have seen for nutrition advice 100 years ago?

One book that may give us a glimpse, published in 1924 book, is called “Physical Culture Food Directory.” The author, Milo Hastings, was an American inventor, author, and nutritionist. He also invented a snack for children, called Weeniwinks, based on natural grains and no sugar. I don’t know how typical this book was for the time, but it’s interesting to see parallels to today’s popular nutrition books through his words.

On making nutrition more understandable:

“It has been my job to translate scientific facts and theories concerning human food and its relation to health and disease into a form…most understandable…and useful to the general public.” (A job description recognizable to the modern dietitian.) Continue reading →