Healthy U offers tips and recipes for healthy meals and food preparation and links to numerous Canadian Web sites that offer dependable information to help you and your family answer your health questions.
Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating offers simple guidelines for eating well.
To get all the nutrients you need, eat a variety from each of four main food groups:
- Grain products – choose whole grain and enriched products more often.
- Vegetables and fruit – choose dark green and orange vegetables and orange fruit more often.
- Milk products – choose lower-fat milk products more often. Calcium in milk products build strong bones.
- Meat and alternatives – choose leaner meats, poultry and fish, as well as dried peas, beans and lentils more often. Animal foods such as meat, eggs and milk products are a natural source of vitamin B12. B-vitamins make red blood cells that keep your nervous system healthy and help your body use energy from food.
Balance a healthy diet with ample physical activity.
Eating the right amount of food is as important as what you choose to eat. For information of serving sizes, please refer to Canada's Food Guide to Health Eating.
Include plenty of grain products, vegetables and fruits in your diet.
These foods provide vitamins, minerals and fibre, as well as other non-nutrients that may protect you against cancer heart disease and high blood pressure.
Choose a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol.
This will reduce your risk of suffering heart disease, cancer and high blood pressure.
Limit the amount of sugar, salt and caffeine in your diet.
Added sugars have no other nutrients; when consumed in excess, they crowd healthier foods out of your diet.
Limiting salt will help reduce risk of high blood pressure.
Caffeine is a stimulant that speeds up your central nervous system, long term effects can include insomnia, depression, high cholesterol and irregular heart beat.
Consume alcohol in moderation, if at all.
Alcohol supplies calories but few or no nutrients. Drinking alcohol is also the cause of many health problems and accidents, and can lead to addiction. Moderate alcohol consumption is defined as no more than two drinks a day for men, no more than 1 drink a day for women. Women who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant should avoid alcoholic beverages altogether.
Remember that healthy eating tastes great.
Try some fast and easy recipes from the Dietitians of Canada – Great Food Fast (2000) or the newest cookbook, Cook Great Food (2002), a collection of 450 recipes offering tasty choices for everyday family meals, entertaining and quick light meals.
Other Active Living & Healthy Eating information:
Alberta
National
- August 2005 
