Building a Cholesterol-Lowering Diet: Explaining the effects of cholesterol in food, Naming the different kinds of fats in food, Classifying carbohydrates and dietary fiber and Practicing moderation.

Building a Cholesterol-Lowering Diet

In This Chapter

� Explaining the effects of cholesterol in food

� Naming the different kinds of fats in food

� Classifying carbohydrates and dietary fiber

� Practicing moderation

Pop quiz: Who said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”? No, it wasn’t John F. Kennedy, although he used it in a speech. No, it wasn’t Condoleeza Rice. No, no, no, it wasn’t Jon Stewart. The actual author of the quote was the ancient Chinese philosopher Laotzu.

Clearly, ol’ Laotzu, who lived 26 centuries before cholesterol was identified, wasn’t an expert on dietary fats and fiber, but he sure had a handle on human nature. And his admonition to just get going — take that first step — is great advice for anyone who wants to lower his or her cholesterol.

As you read this chapter, remember that the very first step in this particular journey is to set a diet strategy. Cut back on fats. Increase your consumption of foods high in dietary fiber. And put this all together so you can look forward to smiling as your doctor says, “Wow! Your cholesterol is down.” Frankly, I think Laotzu would approve. Don’t you?

Making Your Game Plan

I say, “Diet.” You think, “Calories.” No surprise there — for most people, diet is synonymous with weight-loss plan. But if I add cholesterol control to diet, the picture changes.

In Chapter 4, I discuss all the people who helped create the authoritative cholesterol-control diet, a regimen that delivers one simple message: Eat less

fat and more dietary fiber. Not that calories don’t count: As you can see in Chapter 7, losing weight is an excellent way to improve your cholesterol numbers. But the pleasant surprise is that if you manage your fat and fiber, the calories take care of themselves, and your diet takes care of your cholesterol. What a great deal.

Choosing the Fat That Fits

All fats, including the fat on your bod and (more to the point) the fats in your food, are composed of fatty acids — long chain-like molecules of carbon and hydrogen atoms plus an oxygen atom or two. Folks in the know about fats put fatty acids into one of three categories:

� Saturated

� Monounsaturated

� Polyunsaturated

The chemical differences between these fats are described in the “Demystifying saturation” sidebar later in this chapter. For the moment, the important thing to keep in mind is that a diet high in saturated fats raises cholesterol levels, and a diet high in unsaturated fats lowers them.

Dealing up close and personal with cholesterol

Eating a lot of foods high in dietary cholesterol increases the amount of cholesterol in your blood and raises your risk of heart attack. So, controlling the cholesterol in your diet reduces the risk of two potential problems in your arteries.

Cholesterol is a saturated fat found only in foods from animals: meat, dairy products, and eggs.

� Dietary-cholesterol problem #1: As I explain in Chapter 2, cholesterol and perhaps homocysteine (an amino acid produced when you digest food — the jury is still out on this amino acid) can rough up the linings of your arteries, creating teensy little crags that snag cholesterol particles as they float by. The trapped cholesterol particles snag other debris floating through your blood, producing small piles of gunk (technical term: plaque) that narrow and may eventually block the artery, leading to the unpleasant event called a heart attack.

Fat entries in the name game

The chemical family name for fats and related compounds, such as cholesterol, is lipids, which comes from lipos, the Greek word for fat. Now that you know that little factoid, you’re likely to see the lipo- (or lipe-) prefix popping up every- where you look.

For example, the correct scientific term for your cholesterol numbers is lipid profile. And your lipid profile includes lipoproteins, the fat-and- protein particles that carry cholesterol around and sometimes out of your body. Here are a few more lipo-licious words:

� Lipases: Enzymes that enable you to digest fats

� Lipemia: Excess amounts of fat in your blood

� Lipoblasts: Embryonic fat cells

� Lipomas: Fatty tumors

� Liposuction: Surgical removal of body fat Just about the only “lip” that doesn’t come from lipos is your lip, the one that covers your teeth. That lip is descended from labium, the Latin word for, you guessed it, lip. As Sigmund Freud, he of the mysterious unconscious, once said, “Sometimes a good cigar is just a smoke.”

 � Dietary-cholesterol problem #2: Extra cholesterol in your diet may also increase the amount of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) in your blood. LDLs, also known as “bad” cholesterol, are the fat and protein particles that ferry cholesterol into your arteries, leading to problem #1.

Conclusion? Adding foods high in cholesterol can mess up any diet, which certainly explains why every description of a cholesterol-lowering diet calls the diet low cholesterol and controlled fat. You keep the cholesterol low and you control the kinds of fat by following the 30-10-300 formula described in Chapter 4:

� Less than 30 percent of your total calories each day from fat — predominantly unsaturated fats

� Less than 10 percent of your total calories each day from saturated fat

� Less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol per day, regardless of your calorie count

Showing fat who’s boss

After you decide to control your cholesterol by controlling the amount of fat in your diet, the question is, which foods work best and which foods aren’t that hot?

Unconfusing a confusing cholesterol calculation

In 2000, nutrition scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University (Boston) fed volunteers one of two diets. Both diets derived 30 percent of their total calories from fat, but one diet used polyunsaturated fat from corn oil, and the other got its saturated fat from beef. And don’t let me forget to mention that both diets included extra cholesterol.

Ordinarily, a diet high in unsaturated fats reduces the amount of cholesterol circulating in your blood, and a diet high in saturated fat does the opposite, increasing the amount of cholesterol circulating in your blood. In addition, a diet high in unsaturated fatty acids is generally assumed to inhibit a chemical reaction called oxidation that makes LDLs more likely to slip into your arteries and start the downhill slide toward a heart attack. But guess what?

� Adding cholesterol to the diets high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (corn oil) increased LDL oxidation by 28 percent.

� Adding cholesterol to the high-saturated beef-fat diet increased oxidation of LDLs by 15 percent.

� Both diets increased the volunteers’ cholesterol levels.

Time out! How come the people on the polyunsaturated fat had a greater increase in LDL oxidation than the people on the saturated beef- fat diet? Because — any math majors in the room? — the amount of oxidation associated with the unsaturated fat diet is much lower to begin with, and any actual increase in oxidation creates a larger percentage increase relative to diets high in saturated fats.

Oh, what an easy one to answer! (Either skip ahead to the section titled “Building a nutritional pyramid” or take a slightly longer way through the following text.)

� Grains: Grains have very small amounts of fat — just about 3 percent of their total weight — and most of the fats in grains are unsaturated. In addition, grains are filling, and they have dietary fiber, which I talk about a bit later in this chapter. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDA/HHS) says that a healthy diet is based on grain foods. Who am I to argue?

� Fruits and veggies: Fruits and vegetables have only traces of fat, and most of it is unsaturated. Your diet should have a lot of fruits and veggies. But you knew that, right?

� Dairy products: Dairy products are a varied lot. For example, sweet cream is a high-fat food. Whole milks and whole-milk cheeses are moderately high in fat. Skim milk and skim-milk products are low-fat foods. And for the record, most of the fats in any dairy product are saturated, but milk products are your best source of calcium, so balance the fats and get your calcium by sticking to low- or no-fat dairy products — and don’t forget the yummy low- or no-fat frozen desserts.

� Meat and poultry: Meat is moderately high in fat, and most of its fats are saturated. Some poultry — chicken and turkey — are relatively low in fat. Other poultry — duck and goose — have higher fat contents. You can lower the fat content of any poultry serving by removing the skin. I know; I know. That’s the good part! But your cholesterol levels will thank you.

� Fish and shellfish: Fish and shellfish are special cases. Some fish, such as salmon and herring, are high in fat, but guess what? Those are the best fish from a cholesterol standpoint because their fats are rich in omega-3 fatty acids (more about them in the sidebar titled, “Omega-3 me”), polyunsaturated fatty acids credited with lowering your risk of heart disease.

Your body converts alpha-linolenic acid, the most important omega-3, to hormone-like substances called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosa- hexaenoic acid (DHA). EPA and DHA appear to protect your heart by reducing inflammation, preventing blood clots, and — get this! — preventing other fats like cholesterol from injuring artery walls.

Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, found in beef, pork, and several veggie oils (corn, cottonseed, safflower, and sunflower), are chemical cousins of omega-3s, but they don’t protect your heart.

� Fats and oils: Vegetable oils, butter, and lard are high-fat foods, but their actual fat content varies from heart healthy to are-you-kidding-me! This info is the subject of the “Linking fatty acids and dietary fat” section later in this chapter.

� Proteins: Protein is an essential nutrient — so important that its name comes from the Greek word proteios, which means “holding first place.” A protein molecule is a chain of other molecules called amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Amino acids are molecules made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, plus a nitrogen unit called an amino group.

The amino group is essential for synthesizing (creating) specialized proteins, including the enzymes and hormones that make it possible for you to perform such basic functions as working your muscles and digesting food. So, when people talk about how much protein they need, what they really mean is how much nitrogen they need to synthesize specialized proteins.

Your body also uses proteins to build new cells and maintain tissues. Considering all that, you may be puzzled as to why it has taken me so long to get around to talking about protein. The reason is simple. Some protein foods are positively loaded with cholesterol and saturated fatty acids:

• Animal protein: The only foods that add cholesterol to your diet are foods from animals — meat, poultry, fish, milk products, and eggs. Most of these foods are also high in saturated fatty acids. True, some animal foods have less cholesterol than others. True, some animal foods are lower in saturated fats. True, you can cut

Omega-3 me

It’s clear that laboratory pigs and monkeys have cleaner arteries when their feed includes omega-3 fatty acids, and studies suggest human beings may also benefit. In the Diet and Reinfarction Trial (DART), a 2,033-man study run by the Medical Research Council Epidemio- logical Unit in Cardiff, Wales, in the late 1980s, men who ate two servings of fatty fish a week had a lower rate of heart attack than men who either cut their fat to no more than 30 percent of their total calories or increased their dietary fiber (from grains) to 16 grams a day. Yo, bring on the salmon!

But don’t forget the chocolate or at least the very special new chocolate form Canada. In the summer of 2007, Ocean Nutrition Canada Limited, a company that makes and distributes omega-3 food and dietary supplement ingredients, announced that the O Trois line of chocolate bars and “fingers” from Les Truffes au Chocolat, would henceforth contain omega-3 fatty acids. Who can ask for anything more?

the fat and cholesterol content of animal foods by trimming visible fat. True, some animal foods are rich in special unsaturated fats called omega-3s that actually reduce everybody’s risk of heart disease. But generally, a diet designed to lower your cholesterol emphasizes foods from plants.

• Plant protein: Getting your protein from plant foods is a more complicated task than getting your protein from animal foods. Blame it on the amino acids (those “building blocks” of protein). Proteins from animals are labeled complete, meaning that they contain all the amino acids human beings need to thrive. Proteins from plant foods are often characterized as limited, meaning that they lack sufficient amounts of one amino acid or another. It takes a little work to mix and match plants to get the proper protein balance, but with no cholesterol and practically no saturated fatty acids, plant proteins are worth the effort, don’t ya think? At least once in a while.

Linking fatty acids and dietary fat

All fats are combinations of fatty acids. Nutritionists characterize a dietary fat or oil as saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated depending on which fatty acids make up the largest portion of the fat or oil:

� Foods such as butter, which are high in saturated fatty acids, are solid at room temperature and get harder when chilled.

� Foods such as olive oil, which are high in monounsaturated fatty acids, are liquid at room temperature; they get thicker when chilled.

� Foods such as corn oil, which are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, are liquid at room temperature and stay liquid when chilled.

So how come margarine, which is composed primarily of unsaturated fatty acids, is solid? Because its fatty acids have been artificially saturated with extra hydrogen atoms. This process, called hydrogenation, turns an oil, such as corn oil, into a solid fat — margarine.

Hydrogenated fats are sometimes called trans fatty acids, but no matter what you call them, these fatty acids raise — rather than lower — cholesterol levels. As a result, these days most margarines boast “no trans fats” right on the label. I know your mother told you not to toot your own horn, but these guys have earned the right. So when you’re shopping, pick them.

Table 5-1 shows the fatty acid composition of several common fats and oils. You’re right: Some of the totals below don’t add up to 100 percent. That’s because these fats and oils also contain very small amounts of other kinds of fatty acids that don’t affect the basic character of the fat. The last column, Fat Category, tells you which fatty acids are predominant in the mix.

Factoring in the Fiber

Carbohydrate foods form the base for a healthful, low cholesterol diet. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommended that approximately 55 to 60 percent of your daily calories should come from foods such as grains (particularly whole grains) and fruits and vegetables that are high in complex carbohydrates (a term that I discuss in just a minute).

Table 5-2 does the math to show you what 55 to 60 percent of calories from carbs equals for a 1,600-calorie, 2000-calorie, 2,600-calorie, and 3,100-calorie daily diet, the range of calories for active healthy adults.

Carbohydrates are nutrient molecules built of units of sugar. As the sidebar, “Sweet talk: Simple versus complex,” explains, the more sugar units a carbohydrate molecule contains, the more complex the carbohydrate is.

When it comes to controlling your cholesterol, the most important complex carbohydrate (and the most important carbohydrate, period) is dietary fiber.

Sweet talk: Simple versus complex

Just as proteins are combinations of amino acids, and fats are combinations of fatty acids, carbohydrates are combinations of sugar units described either as simple or complex, depending on the number of sugar units in the molecule:

� Monosaccharides (mono = one; saccharide

= sugar) are carbohydrates with only one

sugar unit. Fructose (the sugar in fruit), glucose (the sugar you use for energy), and galactose (the sugar derived from digesting lactose, also known as milk sugar) are monosaccharides. Monosaccharides are simple carbohydrates.

� Disaccharides (di = two) are carbohydrates with two sugar units, Sucrose (table sugar) is a disaccharide made of one unit of fructose and one unit of glucose. Like mono- saccharides, disaccharides are simple carbohydrates.

� Polysaccharides are carbohydrates with more than two sugar units. Starch, a complex carbohydrate in potatoes, pasta, and rice, is definitely a polysaccharide — it’s made up of many, many sugar units (actually, many units of glucose). Dietary fiber is also made of many, many sugar units. Polysaccharides are complex carbohydrates.

Refraining from eating your shirt: Dietary fiber

The word dietary is stuck in front of fiber to make sure you understand that this fiber, which comes from food, is different from the natural and synthetic fibers, such as silk, cotton, wool, or nylon, used in fabrics.

Dietary fiber is a complex carbohydrate, but it isn’t just any old complex carb like, oh, starch. Your body can digest starch, but it can’t digest dietary fiber because the human gut doesn’t have digestive enzymes strong enough to dissolve the chemical bonds holding the fiber molecule’s sugar units together. As a result, you don’t get any calories or other nutrients from dietary fiber. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Au contraire — on the contrary, as they like to say in France — dietary fiber is very useful in helping to control cholesterol.

Foods contain two kinds of dietary fiber — insoluble dietary fiber and soluble dietary fiber. Both are important to a healthful diet, but only one helps con- trol cholesterol.

Insoluble dietary fiber

Insoluble dietary fiber such as the cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin in whole grains, fruit and veggie skins, and the teensy, little hard thingees in pears bulks up stool and makes it softer, reducing your risk of developing hemorrhoids and lessening the discomfort if you already have them.

Sweeping away a fiber myth

For more than 30 years, nutrition studies and experts said that consuming insoluble dietary fiber might also protect against colon cancer. But then in 1999 — wham! — new data from the Nurses’ Health Study at Harvard University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston said, “Ooops!” According to the Nurses’ numbers, no relationship — zip, zero, zilch — exists between a high-fiber diet and the risk of colon cancer.

In fact, among the 88,757 women in the 16-year study, the incidence of colon cancer was the same whether the women ate a lot of fiber or practically none. In fact, some women who ate a lot of fruit and veggies were actually at higher risk.

These conclusions were confirmed in 2005 when a team of 29 researchers from 21 institutions in 7 different countries toted up the results of 13 separate studies. The project — called the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer — produced exactly the same results: Eating a lot of high-fiber foods didn’t reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.

On the other hand, you know these science folks. Yesterday’s “yes” sometimes becomes today’s “no” — or vice versa. As for tomorrow, who knows?

In the memorable words of the New England Journal of Medicine, insoluble dietary fiber acts like a “colonic broom,” stimulating intestinal contractions that move solid waste through your digestive tract. By moving food quickly through your intestines, insoluble dietary fiber may help prevent or relieve digestive disorders such as constipation or diverticulosis (infection caused by food getting stuck in small pouches in the wall of your colon).

Insoluble dietary fiber has no effect on your cholesterol. To bring cholesterol into the picture, you have to turn to the second kind of dietary fiber, the solu- ble variety.

Soluble dietary fiber

Pectins and gums are soluble dietary fiber. Both dissolve in your stomach forming gels that look like the stuff made from packages of fruit gelatin. This gel is believed to sop up cholesterol and slide it out of your body, thus reducing the amount of cholesterol particles that are left to wander around your blood vessels and make trouble.

You find pectins in the fruit-part of fruits (apples are a particularly good source). Gums are most plentiful in legumes (beans and peas) and grains such as oatmeal and barley.

Fiber in animal foods

Gotcha! There’s no dietary fiber in any food from animals. No fiber in meat. No fiber in fish. No fiber in chicken. No fiber in milk. No fiber in eggs. See why plant foods are so important in a cholesterol-lowering diet?

Getting it just right

Remember Goldilocks, the gal who found three bowls of porridge, one too hot, one too cold, and one just right? Well, dietary fiber is something like that.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that the average American woman gets about 12 grams of fiber a day from food; the average American man gets about 17 grams. These amounts are well below the current recommendations of 25 grams a day for a woman and 38 grams a day for a man.

But if you decide to stuff yourself with dietary fiber to make up for years and years of low-fiber noshing, the result may be gastric distress — an unmistak- able body protest in the form of intestinal gas or diarrhea. In extreme cases, loading up on dietary fiber but failing to drink sufficient amounts of liquid to swish the fiber through your gut can lead to an intestinal obstruction. Yipes!

So remember the Golden, I mean, the Goldilocks Rule: Not too little. Not too much. Just right. And build up your fiber intake gradually, please. Your tummy, as well as your cholesterol, will thank you.

A gentle reminder

At the start of this chapter, I said that if you take care of the fat and fiber, the calories will take care of themselves. Remember? If not, that’s okay — I just said it again.

Fat is high in calories; carbohydrate foods are relatively low in fat and thus relatively low in calories. Dietary fiber has no calories at all. If you limit your fats and increase your dietary fiber and complex carbs, you automatically cut calories and lose weight. Check out Table 5-3 for the breakdown.

Fiber factoid

Raw food almost always has more fiber per ounce (or gram) than cooked food because cooking generally adds water, which adds weight and spreads out the fiber content. For

example, a 3.5-ounce portion of dried prunes has more prunes (and thus more dietary fiber) than a 3.5-ounce portion of stewed prunes, which serves up water as well as prunes.

You Know the Deal: Everything in Moderation

Nutrition gurus like to say that there’s no such thing as a bad food, only a less effective food plan. However — and it’s a big however — some foods are more effective than others when it comes to lowering your cholesterol.

To point you in the right direction, Chapter 6 lays out a list of specific foods that help reduce cholesterol levels and the risk of heart attack. It also lists foods that can increase your cholesterol and your risk.

Okay, you’ve started your game plan and read about the necessary elements of said plan. Now put this cholesterol-lowering puppy together.

Building a nutritional pyramid

You’re probably familiar with the old USDA/HHS Food Guide Pyramid, shown in Figure 5-1. This pyramid was used for a long time, but now there’s a new kid on the block.

The food pyramid in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005 is a more elas- tic structure than previous versions. Instead of building block on block, this pyramid, shown in Figure 5-2, is made of triangular sections you can expand or shrink depending on your nutritional needs. And instead of being called the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which is kind of cold, it’s now known as My Pyramid. As in, warm and fuzzy, get it?

This pyramid is available online at www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/index. html. The site provides multitudinous facts about how to stretch the pyramid one way or the other to accommodate your particular preferences. No computer access? Move on to the next section.

Filling out the pyramid with daily servings

The trick to using the pyramid is to count food portions, otherwise known as servings. Table 5-4 and Table 5-5 show you two ways to assemble your very own diet pyramid based on the number of servings suggested by either one of two authoritative food plans, each designed to provide the nutrients required for a daily diet that delivers 1,600 calories, 2,000 calories, 2,600 calories, or 3,100 calories. Each plan is outlined as follows:

� Plan #1 is the basic USDA Food Guide, a standard healthful eating plan for healthy adult men and women.

� Plan #2 is the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, a similarly healthful eating plan designed to lower blood pressure based on principles drawn from research at the National Institutes of Health.

Note for purists: The order in which the food groups are listed differs slightly on these two food plans in Tables 5-4 and 5-5.

For example, grains are Numero Uno on the DASH plan but third on the USDA design. To make it easier for you to compare the plans, I have juggled things a bit to put the food groups in the same order on both Tables 5-4 and 5-5. Whew!

Hey, Ma. What’s a serving?

Figuring out the number of servings you need is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what constitutes a serving. Not to worry: We do it for you. All you have to do is run your finger down Table 5-6.

Notice something about these portions? Yes, indeedy, although some of the servings seem to fit the norm — a cup of milk, a slice of bread, a medium piece of fruit — other pyramid servings — especially servings of high-fat, high-cholesterol animal foods such as meat — are much smaller than the portions usually found on American plates.

(For more tips on visualizing exactly what individual servings look like, check out the “Dishing up servings” sidebar in this chapter.)

In France, where everyone eats all the high-fat foods that terrify Americans, people used to stay slim with a risk of heart disease much lower than in the U.S. But in recent years, as the portions have expanded, the risks have grown.

Do your friends in France a favor: After you memorize this part of this chap- ter, lend them your book. After they’ve got the portion sizes down pat, it’s back to Vive la France! Vive la pâté de foie gras, Camembert cheese, tart tatin . . . all in USDA-acceptable serving sizes, of course.

Checking out the nutrient chart

For those of you who enjoy the challenge of totaling up grams and milligrams, heeeeeeeeeere’s the ticket: Flip to the appendix where the USDA Nutrient Database is described. The Web site given lists more than 6,000 — yes, 6,000 — different foods and servings sizes. Browse to your heart’s content at www.nal. usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl.

Ending with a word for the nutrition-curious reader

This chapter explains why fats and dietary fiber figure so prominently in a cholesterol-lowering diet. But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that there’s more — much more — to discover about proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

To find out what you’re missing here, check out Nutrition For Dummies, 4th Edition (Wiley). In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I wrote it. More important, the book has an entire chapter devoted to each important nutrient. I wanted to include those chapters here, but my editors said that would make this book more than 500 pages long. I tried to convince them that lifting a 100-pound book three or four times a day counts as exercise, which — as you can plainly see in Chapter 8 — helps lower cholesterol.

But I couldn’t get them to budge on this one. So get a copy of Nutrition For Dummies, 4th Edition, too.

Dishing up servings

To use the serving system from the Food Guide Pyramid, it may help to get some hands-on (and eyes-on) experience with the individual por- tions. That way, you can store real-life versions of the recommended servings in your memory banks. So grab an 8-ounce measuring cup and a kitchen scale and head for the kitchen to play with your food and follow these steps:

� Broil a small steak, roast a chicken breast, or grill up a burger. When the grub is done, use your kitchen scale to weigh out a 3- ounce portion. It should be about the size of a deck of cards (okay, a small calculator). That’s a meat serving.

� Boil some rice. Fill your measuring cup to the halfway mark with the cooked rice. Take the rice out of the cup and mush it into a ball. That’s a grains or cereal serving.

� Tear up some greens. Fill the measuring cup to the 8-ounce mark. Dump the greens onto a salad plate. That’s one serving.

� Open one can of veggies or fruit. Fill the measuring cup to the half mark with one or the other. Spoon the food into a small bowl. That’s one serving.

� Pop open a can of soda. Pour it into the measuring cup right up to the 8-ounce mark. Pour that into a glass. Add some ice. It’s probably more soda than you get in an upscale restaurant but less than the burger barn serves. No matter: It’s still one certified USDA serving.