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Friday, July 25, 2025

HEALTHY PLATES FOR 2022

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1279 days ago
20220125

Dr Roslyn Al­fred-De­mas

The pan­dem­ic has cer­tain­ly taught us that we al­ways need to pro­tect and safe­guard our own health and im­mune sys­tem de­fences. As food prices in­crease, this can cer­tain­ly be daunt­ing. We are a peo­ple that love flavour and a na­tion that is blessed with a pletho­ra of palat­able del­i­ca­cies. How then can we be guid­ed when we shop for food and when we sit to have our meals?

In­ter­na­tion­al bod­ies ad­vo­cate

The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion ad­vo­cates for a bal­anced di­et con­sist­ing of dai­ly fruits and veg­eta­bles and grains. This is of para­mount im­por­tance and while stay­ing ac­tive is key; we cer­tain­ly can­not out­run our cut­lery. What­ev­er we con­sume is linked to in­flam­ma­to­ry process­es with­in our bod­ies and Chron­ic non com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases.

The De­part­ment of Nu­tri­tion at the Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health has is­sued guides on the Healthy Eat­ing Plate for use by all ages and for cre­at­ing healthy and bal­anced meals, even on the go in a way that can be af­ford­able and prac­ti­cal.

Whether you choose to plant or shop, this ap­proach is achiev­able. Let’s make that pos­i­tive change to­wards a more ful­fill­ing and longer life with less med­ical ex­pens­es in the fu­ture!

Some help­ful hacks in achiev­ing your Healthy Plate:

- Imag­ine your plate as a cir­cle or even a square. Half of this cir­cle or square should be fruits and veg­eta­bles and sal­ads. Fill­ing veg­eta­bles in­clude me­l­on­gene, ochro, car­ille, broc­coli, cau­li­flower, and green leaves.

- Pota­toes are not veg­eta­bles, sim­i­lar­ly Irish pota­toes, white pas­ta, white bread, rice, corn­meal, white flour roti are quite starchy.

- Quar­ter of one’s plate or one’s fist size or one pot spoon should be whole grains and what we call com­plex car­bo­hy­drates, such as ground pro­vi­sion, quinoa, oats, hemp seeds, and food made from whole wheat. Seeds like chia, flax, sun­flower and pump­kin al­so add fill­ing ad­di­tions to one’s plates.

- If for ex­am­ple one choos­es to have mac­a­roni pie and pota­to sal­ad they both must fit on a quar­ter of the plate, or just choose ei­ther one or the oth­er.

- On most days of the week it’s bet­ter though to con­sume the more com­plex car­bo­hy­drates which have a low­er gly­caemic in­dex and less­er ef­fect on our blood glu­cose.

- The last quar­ter is our pro­tein which pro­vides the most sat­is­fac­tion to our hunger. This food group in­cludes an­i­mal pro­tein like meat and eggs and plant pro­tein like healthy al­mond nuts and peanut but­ter and legumes. Bo­di tends to be less starchy than lentils and pi­geon peas.

- Peanuts and cashew nuts can con­tribute to weight gain.

- Lim­it red meat as it can be car­cino­genic.

- Low fat doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean healthy. Nei­ther does go­ing ve­g­an equate to health­i­er.

- Good oils in­clude olive and canola oil, as well as av­o­ca­do fruit.

- Care­ful with sweet condi­ments like ketchup – yes ketchup it’s both sweet and salty.

- Cin­na­mon and essences serve as healthy and nat­ur­al sweet­en­ers.

- Avoid eat­ing late at night. Eat when hun­gry and eat to sat­is­fy (not for eat­ing’s sake).

- When out, try re­verse plat­ing where one plates out the sal­ad, veg­gies, fruits and pro­tein first, then leaves the car­bo­hy­drates for last.

- Avoid sug­ary drinks and keep hy­drat­ed.

- Af­ter adopt­ing the above, I can tell you that I feel on top of the world and have en­er­gy for days and men­tal clar­i­ty to make it through a busy work sched­ule, on­line school and jug­gling life. I im­plore all to adopt and adapt as we move for­ward in 2022.


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