Nutrition and Health – Spring 2021 – March 4th – More Questions about the Diet Assignment

Joseph Dixon ♦ March 5, 2021 ♦ Leave a comment

Here are more questions from students. Note that the last 2 questions are similar and I have received about 10 of these. Many people are getting caught up in little details and not worried about the main point of the assignment – to get a general picture of how and what you eat and what nutrients you are not getting enough of. It is important to keep a good record, find all of your foods in the database (hard to do), and to see in general and in comparison to the whole class how you are doing. Most important is to do a good job on answering the questions. Show that you thought about the assignment.

New Questions:

Question: Hello Mr. Dixon,    I hope all is well. I had a quick question on the diet assignment for Nutrition and Health 255. On one of the documents it said not to put any supplements. I was wondering if whey protein powder counted as a supplement and whether or not I should include or exclude it from the diet assignment. It is a significant sector of protein I would be excluding so I was wondering that.   Please let me know.   Best,

Answer: Hi, Thank you for your email.  Definitely include whey powder in your assignment!   You might want to comment on it on the first slide.   Sincerely,  Joe Dixon

Question: Good morning Professor Dixon,   I hope all is well. My name is ________ from your Nutrition and Health 255 course. I had a question concerning the calculations in the diet assignment when I finished inputting my information for the Carbohydrates, Protein, and Fat – my overall Kcal was 2,284.4 which was higher than the one given in the analysis( 2,203 kcal ) . But when comparing my answer to your example on the PowerPoint your Kcal calculation is lower giving you a remaining percentage. I would really appreciate your feedback.  Best Regards,

Answer: You did exactly right  – don’t worry that the summed Calories don’t match the program’s value.  No matter what this gives you a good idea of your % Calorie breakdown.  By the way your fiber is great! Joe Dixon

Question:    Dear Dr. Dixon, For some of the foods I ate, I could not find it in the database, so I used the “my custom food” option to manually put in all nutrition values based on what it says on the package. I am not sure if that is the reason why, but I did not get the red dots next to some of the nutrients like other have in their analysis and I am not sure if I am allowed to use those nutrients to answer questions (i.e. using biotin and iodine for lowest mineral). Also, I just started concerning whether I was allowed to manually input nutrition information in the first place…

In addition, I happened to have 0% DV for Biotin, Iodine, Chromium, Molybdenum, and Chloride. Is it okay if I list all of them as my lowest mineral based on %DV?  I am attaching the powerpoint for the assignment that I am working on so that you can understand my question better by looking at my actual daily diet analysis. Thank you. Sincerely,

Answer:  Hi, thank you for your email.  Do not list Biotin, Iodine, Chromium, Molybdenum, and Chloride as your lowest because I have a red dot next to them so the values are not in the database so we do not know what our intake of them is.  I am not sure why you do not have a red dot next to them.   Also, do not list fluoride.  That is fine you used the custom food option, although most of the foods in your list I think can be found in the database.  Sincerely,  Joe Dixon

Question:   Hi Professor,   I was trying to do my on the website provided but it very hard to do especially with the way I eat. I bodybuild so I have very specific foods with everything weighed out. I use myfitnesspal a lot and was wondering if I could use that platform instead of myfoodrecord.com. I provided pictures of the app and was wondering if you could take a look at it and tell me what you think. Thank you,

Answer:    Hi,  Thanks for emailing me and showing me the myfitnesspal data.  I understand that it is hard to find things – but you have to use myfoodrecord.com.   Does myfitnesspal have Vitamin K, Folate, Vitamin C, selenium etc.?  I haven’t looked at it for a while.  Anyway, it is good that we  (all students) use the same database.  If you want to also show myfitness pal data for the same day, that would be greatly appreciated because every semester someone does that and it is interesting to see how the numbers are similar or different for the main things.   Joe Dixon

Question: Hello Professor,  I was completing the calculations part of the diet assignment, and I realized that the remaining kcal is higher than 100% as shown below. Is this okay? Please let me know, thank you!

Answer: Hi,  Thanks for your email.  Yes, it is OK.  It was off by about 1%.  Believe me that is very close.  And your carbs are very close to 50% of Calories! 

Question:  Good afternoon Professor,   I hope you are doing well and staying safe.   I have a problem calculating the total calories. For some reason, when I calculated the fats, protein and carbohydrates I got 1277.2 kcal in total but the data says I only consumed 1250 kcal. Is there an error in my calculation or the website is wrong? I saw the example slide and you actually calculated a lower a mount of kcal and had extra kcal left coming from somewhere else. But mine is kind of over and seems wrong? I attached my analysis slide below. Let me know! Thanks!

Answer: It is ok that there is a difference.  Use the ones you added up for the percents.  Thanks,  Joe Dixon