Dietary Planning - Written by Joshua Mullin
Thursday August 20th, 2009
There are many factors that need to be taken into account when planning diet plans for individual and group athletes, these are; Food labels, Food tables, Food diaries, Commercially available systems and the Fundamentals of nutrition. I will now explain these in more detail:
Food labels
Food labels allow you to see the percentage of the daily values of certain individual food, how much carbohydrate fat and protein in individual foods and usually what percentage of the carbohydrates and fats sugar and saturate.
The image to the right is a typical example of a food label.
As you can see it shows the serving size in weight, the total amount of calories, the total amount of calories of fat and the percentage of daily values. It shows the serving size because it this is the amount eaten by the majority of people. It shows the total amount of calories because people can then see how many total calories they are taking in during the day. It shows the calories from fat as this helps consumers to meet their dietary guidelines of no more than 30% fat in a day. It shows the percentage of daily values so consumers can easily determine whether a certain food contributes to a particular nutrient therefore making sure their getting the correct balanced diet.
When planning a food diary for an athlete food labels help by showing the percentage of each nutrient in the food, therefore if an athlete needed high amounts of protein for recovery, this can easily be determined by looking at the food label.
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