Nutritional Guidelines

Interviewer: What nutritional guidelines should we be following? Interviewee: Well, probably the best source of nutritional guidelines are those that are issued by the American Cancer Society or the National Cancer Institute. And the American Cancer Society, for example, offers four really basic, simple nutrition guidelines. The first guideline, which in my mind is the most important, is to choose most of the foods that you eat from plant sources, and we can talk in more detail about that in a moment. The second guideline is to limit your intake of high fat foods, particularly from animal sources. The third guideline is to be physically active and achieve a normal, healthy body weight. And the final guideline is to limit consumption of alcoholic beverages if you choose to drink at all. Interviewer: So Susan, one of the things we always hear about ...from the American Cancer Society is this five-a-day recommendation. Maybe if you could explain to our listening audience what that actually means. Interviewee: The five-a-day recommendation is a very simple way of communicating the message to increase consumption of these plant foods. And what five-a-day means is five servings per day of fruits and vegetables in total. And some people misunderstand this guideline, and they may think it's okay if I have five glasses of fruit juice a day, and I've met my five-a-day guideline. The goal is really to choose both fruits and vegetables as part of the five-a-day guideline, to vary the fruits and vegetables that you eat on a daily basis, and that alone is a very major step forward in terms of reducing your risk for cancer.