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Why should I try this?
Use this guide to explore how creating weekly meal plans will ultimately save you time and make it easier to keep to your food budget by ensuring you buy only what you need and that all your food in your home is eaten and not binned.
What are food labels and why use them?
Food labels show us information about what foods and drinks contain. It’s important you know where to find the information you need and what to look for.
The current laws around food labelling in the UK outline what information must be provided and how that information must be presented. Food labelling should be clear, easy to read and not misleading. But, the nutrition labelling rules do not apply to food supplements or natural mineral waters.
What does and does not count for 5 A Day?
Almost every type of fresh, frozen, tinned and dried fruit and veg you can think of counts towards your 5 A Day.
So do fruit or vegetables in ready-meals or shop-bought sauces. However, always check the packaging and watch out for high amounts of salt, fat and sugar – or use the NHS Food Scanner app to quickly find healthier swaps.
Fruit could be stripped from yogurts under Labour’s ‘counter-intuitive’ junk food crackdown, manufacturers have warned.
Food giants such as Danone are understood to be concerned that new rules on sugar and nutrition may force manufacturers to rethink recipes or even withdraw perfectly healthy products from supermarket shelves altogether.
Deep-fried food is set to be entirely removed from school menus across England, while sugary treats will face strict limitations, under a comprehensive overhaul of standards designed to combat childhood obesity and widespread tooth decay.
Food is a bit like the weather – a topic we talk about all the time without realising we’re doing it. We ask each other what we’re having for lunch and describe dinner plans; we say we’ve ‘earned’ a brownie after a hard day at work or announce ‘the diet starts tomorrow!’ when we take a piece of cake.
The sugar tax, formally known as the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, was introduced by Theresa May’s government in 2018 with the aim of curbing the nation’s sweet tooth by increasing the cost of the most sugary soft drinks. The levy targets manufacturers – although this cost is often filtered down to consumers – and applies increased charges to drinks containing more than 8g of sugar per 100ml. Recently, the Labour government announced reforms to the tax, lowering the threshold to pay the levy and expanding it to milk-based beverages. However, this policy was far more than an attempt to raise tax revenues: it was positioned as a public health tool, aimed at tackling type 2 diabetes, obesity and the strain on the NHS from a nation fed on convenience products.
With the help of dietician Megan Mehnert, we’re going to look at the different food groups and how they can affect your mood, plus some tips and recipes that can help you choose to eat the foods you need for a balanced diet.
Eating five fruits and vegetables a day might not cut it, research suggests, with those who eat 11 different plants a day proving to be healthier.
People in the UK eat a median of eight different plants a day – including spices and fat-based oils – with some eating just two daily, researchers from King’s College London found.
How do we decide that a food is ‘unhealthy’? Is it by counting how many vitamins and minerals it contains? Should we measure healthiness by calories? Or should we follow in the footsteps of food packaging labels and assess fat, sugar and salt instead?
After 17 years working in nutrition, this has become one of the clearest patterns I see. Most people already understand the basics: eat more vegetables, include protein, drink water, limit ultra-processed foods and don’t rely solely on caffeine to get through the day. But information is rarely the missing piece.
Most Americans are overweight or obese; the situation has become a national health concern. Obesity negatively impacts job performance and is responsible for the expenditure of most of the nation’s health-care dollars. Obesity-related diseases are also the leading cause of death. In response to this problem, Americans have resorted to numerous ineffective fad diets (paleo, Zone, grapefruit, The Cleanse, Atkins, keto, etc.) that have not effectively reduced obesity. Exercising is generally an ineffective way to lose weight; muscles did not evolve to effectively lose weight.
The key to a healthy diet is to eat the right amount of calories for how active you are so you balance the energy you consume with the energy you use.
If you eat or drink more than your body needs, you’ll put on weight because the energy you do not use is stored as fat. If you eat and drink too little, you’ll lose weight.
This means eating a wide variety of foods in the right proportions, and consuming the right amount of food and drink to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight.
People with special dietary needs or a medical condition should ask their doctor or a registered dietitian for advice.
