Two dietitians will offer expert advice Saturday on a topic close to nearly everyone's heart - weight control - during a free telephone hotline service.
Mary Young and Darci Stapley, clinical dietitians at Cottonwood Hospital, Murray, and LDS Hospital, 8th Avenue and C Street, respectively, will answer telephone calls from the public. They will cover such subjects as modifying weight through healthy eating and exercise.The two will respond to questions on the Deseret News/-Intermountain Health Care Hotline, 1-800-925-8177, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The confidentiality of callers will be maintained.
New regulations being considered by Congress would require more precise labeling of foods, and that could be a vast help to anyone who wants to control caloric intake, Young said.
Presently, consumers can find it difficult to figure out from the label how much fat they're actually getting, she said. People practically have to resort to algebraic equations to find that out.
For example, she said, a label might declare that lunch meat is 97 percent fat-free.
"That is by weight, it's not percent of calories," she said. "Someone might look at that and think, `Oh, that's got to be a very low-fat product.
"But in reality, the calories coming from fat might be as much as 50 percent."
This is important because someone on a low-fat diet should not be getting half of his calories from fat. With low-fat diets, she said, dietitians often tell people to choose food with less than 25 percent of its calories derived from fat.
What kinds of food are low in fat? "Pretzels, graham crackers, plain popcorn, certain low-fat yogurt," Young said. Also, vegetables are good, as are "most any fruit - except for avocados and coconuts."
Cereal, rice and plain bread are all right. But heavy dough products, like donuts, pastries and banana-nut bread might be a bit too hefty for some dieters.
Another change that may help with labeling is that strict guidelines could tie definite information to such general statements as "low-fat," "non-fat," or "low-sodium."
Under the present rules, she said, food manufacturers might cut by half the amount of salt in a product. Then, no matter how much is left, "they can call it `half the sodium,' " she said.
The phrase is meaningless, unless a consumer knows how much sodium was in the food in the first place. The remaining 50 percent might still be far too high.
Changes that are being discussed could help cut down on fat, she said. In Young's opinion, the average American is eating too much fat.
"I think there's a good movement on for people to change - and I think people are changing" their diets, she said.
She quickly added that if they're not actually changing, at least they have become conscious of the need to reduce fat intake.
A generation ago, far fewer people were aware of the problems with their diets. "It was meat and potatoes and they didn't think anything about it," Young said.
"But now they're thinking about new alternatives that will improve their diet."