Which do you prefer – negative feedback or positive feedback?  Obviously, you don’t need to answer.  It’s a rhetorical question.  But an important one to think about as it comes to eating habits in our country. 

After all, when was the last time you heard a positive food message?  Cut out fat, trans fat will kill you, salt is evil, carbohydrates are making us fat. . .the list of negative messages goes on and on when in reality there are plenty of positive messages we could be talking and thinking about with food. 

For example, if you focused on really getting the recommended 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, the rest of your eating habits might just fall into place nicely.  Think of all the options – glorious berries, juicy tomatoes, crunchy fresh green beans.

Another positive mantra you might choose to live by is focusing on getting 25-35 grams of fiber every day, and again the rest might just work its way out.  Think bean and avocado burritos in a whole wheat tortilla, think breakfast cereal loaded with fiber that you can really sink your teeth into. 

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?

Visit www.nuval.com  to see a program that honors the positive benefits of fruits and vegetables as well as foods that dare to be high in fiber.

This summer, my coworker Anne has had the most amazing experience.  Anne and her family (husband, three kids) typically reside in a suburb of Boston, and live the typical suburban lifestyle.  Like many of us who live in a ring outside a major metropolitan area, they have sampled some of what Boston has to offer, but most of their time is spent running kids from activity to activity, getting to work every day, dealing with the ongoing management of homework and school papers.  But this summer, totally different story.

Anne and her husband made the decision to move their family into the core of the city this summer, and to fully engage in the downtown Boston experience.  When I saw Anne yesterday, she was still beaming coming off a week’s vacation spent exploring the city.  Her kids have taken sailing lessons.  They’ve visited every single, possible museum in the city.  They’ve hit all the historical sites.  They have painted the town in full form.  Yesterday, Anne said to me, “this has been a summer my kids will never forget.”

What strikes me most about what Anne and her husband did is that they made a very intentional choice.  They weighed the costs and benefits.  They factored in the potential reaction their kids would have.  They considered being away from their home base and how they as adults would react.  But in the end, they acted.  They made an intentional choice to give their kids a summer they will never forget.

It made me think – what intentional choices can we each make today to live healthier lives?  Intentional choice – it’s something to think about.

Visit www.nuval.com to consider a system that makes your intentional choices easier to make.

March 10 is Registered Dietitian Day and in general, I’m not a fan of fabricated days such as this whether they’re created by Hallmark or someone else.  My thought is that the work people do, the accomplishments professions make collectively should stand for themselves.  And if it doesn’t, it just means that we’re not doing our job well enough.

But I’ve changed my mind on this subject, and here’s why.

We are in what a colleague of mine coined as the “age of amateurism.” With the rapid expansion of the internet, there is an abundance of opinion available on every possible topic.  You want to sheet rock and mud and tape the interior of your garage? Just google it and you’ll get more than 7 million hits.  Seriously, I checked.  You want great hotel suggestions in Maui.  Just tweet your request.  Sitting at the bar playing trivia and you don’t know Lady Gaga’s real name?  Just go to Wiki.

What we’ve lost in this information age is the filter, the test of whether the information is accurate and true.

While this might be okay in the bar trivia game or in sheetrocking your garage (afterall, you can redo it if it doesn’t go well the first time), when it comes to your health, you may want to reconsider who you consider your source of information, guidance and advice.

After all, would you want the Golden Gate Bridge to be built based on a blueprint found by searching on the internet?  Would you want the airplane your family is traveling on for vacation to be repaired by someone who started the job yesterday after 20 years working as a stock broker?

When it comes to health, seek the advice of trained, credentialed health professionals, and when it comes to advice on nutrition, seek the advice of trained, credentialed nutritionists, namely registered dietitians.  After all, you have one life to live, one shot at this.  So do it the right way, the first around.

This is the reason I now support Registered Dietitian Day and National Nutrition Month – because it reminds consumers to look to the professional for accurate, reliable advice.

Visit www.nuval.com to experience a system built by trained, credentialed nutrition and medical professionals that helps you choose more nutritious foods.

It happens to Al Gore all the time.  He publicly talks about “green” companies that he thinks are doing things the right way, and gets questioned as to whether he is promoting those companies because he has money invested in them.  Gore’s answer is that his critics have it backwards — he is putting his money where his mouth is by investing in companies he believes are making a difference in the environment.

The analogy can be drawn to the work that both Dr. David Katz and I do with NuVal LLC.  He is a medical doctor, but also the inventor of the algorithm that fuels the NuVal scores.  I’m a dietitian, a trained nutrition expert, but my views related to the world of nutrition guidance systems are always suspect in light of who signs my paycheck.  The suggestion is always there that Dr. Katz and my opinions are not valid because we are biased.

But isn’t it just possible that, like with Al Gore, the egg comes before the chicken?  Is it unrealistic to believe that before taking my job with NuVal, I did my homework, studied the landscape, and decided NuVal was the best tool out there with the potential to change consumers’ lives, and that I wanted to be a part of making this a reality?

In my professional opinion and my opinion as a consumer, a shopper, a mom who sometimes struggles to get healthy food on the table like all of you, NuVal is the best – the best system, the best guidance, the best tool.  And that’s true no matter who signs my paycheck.

Visit Guidance on Nutrition Guidance to read Dr. David’s Katz’s views on the topic, and check out www.nuval.com to see how this system can change your life.