Archive for May, 2010

Each Friday we will bring you an interesting, fun, or just plain strange piece of information that caught our eye.

This week, we offer up an article from Fast Company about a unique idea in portion control. As many of you may know, dinner plates in the U.S. have  grown over the past 60 years from an average diameter of 9 inches to 13 . On top of the extra volume, we also tend to to overload our plates with the wrong types of food. While this idea from two design school grads in Milan, Italy is more about whimsy than nutrition, it’s an innovative idea that could actually make a difference in helping to control what and how much one eats. Here is a link to the full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1636181/amost-genius-plates-double-as-nutritional-infographics

 

Does any know if Color Me Mine (the place where you can paint your own p0ttery) is still around? I’d like to paint my own plate. Here’s what it might look like:

  

Wishing all of you a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. Be well.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with Corinne Kantor (aka the Food Cop). Corinne is a nutrition educator and registered dietetic technician.

I attended one of Corinne’s nutrition workshops in southern Orange County where she talked about the importance of committing to a healthy lifestyle vs. dieting, reading labels and understanding nutritional information. She had lots of great information but one thing that struck me as particularly interesting was her discussion on fluids (probably because this is an area I tend to neglect and know I should work on). Under normal conditions, adults following a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet need approximately 2-3 liters of water per day. Corinne pointed out that some fruits and vegetables are very high in water content. Here is a list of some of those fruits and vegetables:

Fruit/Vegetable	Water Content
Bananas	74%
Peas	76%
Potatoes	79%
Apples	84%
Blueberries	84%
Carrots	84%
Cantaloupe	90%
Grapefruit	91%
Spinach	92%
Strawberries	92%
Watermelon	92%
Zucchini	95%
Lettuce	96%

While I’ve always known that watermelon was aptly named, I never knew that spinach and zucchini had such high water content. Good to know.

You can contact Corinne by visiting her web site at www.thefoodcop.com.