Some basic nutrition guidelines

Whether you are discussing food and drinks with patients or thinking about your own dietary practices, the following 10 general guidelines can serve as a good starting point.

1. Tailor nutrition recommendations to individual need, in the spirit of personalized, proactive, and patient-driven care. Collaborate with your patients to create an individualized nutrition plan that takes into account their economic resources, access to food, cooking ability, and religious and cultural factors. Explore these resources from Old Ways:

• Heritage Diets
• Recipe Library
• Resource Library for Professionals

2. Small changes in eating habits are typically easier to make than complete diet overhauls.¹ Clinicians should not feel like they are doing all the work; each individual should set goals, working with their clinician. These goals should feel realistic, and achieving one goal can often lead to the beginning of a cycle of setting and achieving other goals as well. If you are wondering what to change, review the components of the Standard American Diet, as listed above. Offer examples of possibilities, and encourage patients. For example, if they recognize that their soda consumption may be causing harm to their body, you might encourage them to decrease soda intake by a specified number of ounces per day. Similarly, if they do not want to completely remove burgers from their diet but are open to eating them less frequently, suggest that they only eat red meat once weekly.