jen's everyday blog

A dietary case study

Interestingly, dietitians spend their whole careers working out healthy, balanced, food preference consistent diets for people. I’ve often considered getting advice from one, and I think it’s an excellent idea for anyone who may be making changes in their diet (nudge nudge, wink, wink). However, I myself do like to consider the occasional hypothetical scenario in my own nutrition research, merely for entertainment purposes, of course.

With that in mind, let’s consider a hypothetical case study of an ovo-lacto vegetarian who… oh… I don’t know, doesn’t like beans or potatoes. Is it possible for this person to meet the minimum requirements for each of the three macronutrients? Let’s see. Suppose the person is going for the bare minimum of protein that they need- 15%- and suppose that they only need 1700 calories a day (which is the very very minumum they would probably need, so they would probably have to bump up the calories in some way in addition). Based on the Very Rough and Approximate Values I created for my spreadsheet programs, what would happen if the person had the following sort of daily diet?:

Well- according to the numbers in my spreadsheet, this would provide roughly 15% protein, 35% carbs and 50% fat (with 23% of the fat saturated and 77% non-saturated). So that’s interesting. Of course, this does not address the VERY IMPORTANT issue of micronutrients. For example, I think a person eating this sort of diet would not get enough iron, but I don’t actually know. And, like I said, a person would probalby need more calories than this diet provided. And so on. I expect a registered dietitian would be very helpful in this regard.

posted at 12:47 on Fri, 17 Nov, 2006 | path: /living



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