Great new SA Food Guide

Do you remember the Food Pyramid? The SA Food Guide is the latest visual guide to what healthy, balanced eating should look like. DietDoc explains more.

When I started out to put in writing this text on our new Food Guide, it stricken me that several folks in south africa might not grasp what nutritionists and dieticians mean once we remark a "Food Guide". thus i believed it might be a decent plan to require another explore this nutrition education tool.

What is a Food Guide?

For the past decade the South African nutrition and dietetical fraternity, at the side of the Department of Health, propagated the messages of the initial set of supposed Food-Based Dietary tips. Those of you who scan my DietDoc articles can grasp that I actually have repeatedly said these original tips, notably the primary and most vital guideline that states: "Eat a spread of foods".

The blueprint for the rules was devised by the Word Health Organisation (WHO) and therefore the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in response to the Word Declaration and set up of Action for Nutrition that were adopted at the International Conference on Nutrition in 1992. thus these ideas of tips that ar tailored to precise nutrition messages in terms of the foods folks dine in a selected country and to handle the malady patterns toughened by that specific population are around for a protracted time.

Two of the suggestions contained within the manual revealed by the World Health Organization on a way to compile tips, was that the rules ought to be updated frequently to stay track of changes in dietary habits, food convenience, malady patterns, economic variations, etc, which the ideas expressed within the tips ought to conjointly if attainable be "made visible" by suggests that of a food guide.

A food guide will, therefore, be outlined as "a visual reminder, to support messages from the rules for Healthy Eating" (DoH, 2012).

Background

South Africa has had many various food Guides like a food pyramid, a Square, and numerous Food Plates that includes a large variety of food teams. throughout the propaedeutic part of this project to plot a food guide for African nation, i used to be tasked to put in writing a literature review on the food guides that ar used throughout the planet, as well as south africa.

At the time, I found that visual representations of nutrition messages in south africa were being conferred in such a lot of alternative ways exploitation three food teams, four food teams, five and even half-dozen food teams, so several vital foods that we tend to use a day were being overlooked or unnoticed, that it became evident that we wanted one uniform food guide which might transmit a unified nutrition message to any or all South Africans (Van Heerden, 2008).

I am, therefore, grateful  that the Department of Health and a team of dedicated specialists within the fields of nutrition and bioscience have made our own food guide which is able to hopefully bring clarity to the sector of public nutrition education during this country.
 
What messages will the reserves Food Guide illustrate?



Launched throughout National Nutrition Week 2012, the new reserves Food Guide consists of seven circles of various sizes crammed with samples of the food/beverage teams that we tend to eat/drink in African nation. the various sizes of the circles indicate however vital every one of the food teams is and provides a rough plan of what proportion that food cluster ought to occupy in our diets.

The food teams within the reserves Food Guide ar listed within the table below in degressive order of size and so of importance, at the side of typical samples of the beverages/foods, and therefore the Guideline for Healthy ingestion every food cluster illustrates:

Food Groups in Descending Order of Importance	Foods illustrated in the circle	Guideline for Healthy Eating that the picture illustrates
Water	A jug of clean water and beverages made with water such as tea or coffee	Drink lots of clean, safe water and make it your beverage of choice
Starchy foods	Maize meal, bread, rice, pasta (macaroni, spaghetti), potatoes, breakfast cereals	Make starchy foods part of most meals
Vegetables and Fruit	Cabbage, spinach, butternut, carrots, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, oranges, bananas, strawberries	Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit every day
Legumes	Sugar beans, split peas, lentils, soya mince, canned beans	Eat dry beans, split peas, lentils and soya regularly
Milk and Dairy Products	Milk , maas	Have milk, maas or yoghurt every day
Meat, fish, and eggs	Chicken, fresh and canned fish, meat and eggs	Chicken, fish, lean meat or eggs could be eaten daily
Fats and oils	A tub of soft margarine, a bottle of plant oil and a tub of peanut butter	Use moderate amount of the right types of fats and vegetable oils sparingly

If you visit the food guide units section on the  Nutrition Week web site, you'll notice what measures of every food ar thought to be a food guide unit (e.g. one slice of bread, ½ cup of burned rice, ½ cup of burned recent or frozen vegetables).
Additional data

The Nutrition Week web site conjointly contains backup data concerning every food cluster and why the food teams are organized within the higher than sequence of importance.
 
Although several members of the general public can initially look be up in arms concerning the inclusion or exclusion of sure foods, and therefore the stress that has been placed on one cluster and not on another, you'll notice that if you think that fastidiously in terms of the complete South African population, the economic constraints our folks have to be compelled to face a day, and therefore the pattern of maladys of modus vivendi (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc) that characterise South Africans within the nutrition transition, further because the have to be compelled to boost immunity to combat HIV and TB, and to forestall deficiency disease, then you'll perceive why the new South African Food Guide appearance the method it does!