Читать книгу Safe Food: What to eat and drink in pregnancy - Rosie Dodds - Страница 61

RDA stands for ‘recommended daily amount’. The recommended daily amount of a certain nutrient is the amount that most of us need to keep healthy. RDAs vary from person to person. For example, children’s nutritional needs are different from those of older people, and pregnant women’s nutritional needs are different from those of men, or women who are not pregnant. Very active people need more energy than people who don’t exercise much. The RDAs given on food labels usually refer to adult men.

Food labels usually list the RDAs of vitamins and minerals. The percentage figure given after each nutrient tells us how much of our RDA would be met by a portion of that particular food. For example, ‘Folic acid 34mg (17%)’ means that the food would give us 34mg of folic acid – or 17% of the daily requirement. This sounds very good – but remember that the RDA used is that of an adult man, rather than a pregnant woman whose need is much greater.

Next time you pick up an item of packaged food – a loaf of bread or a tin of baked beans, maybe – take a look at the panel of ‘Nutritional Information’ on the label. This information can be very useful when planning a balanced diet – especially when deciding whether or not to include a new food.

In Chapter 1 we used ‘servings’ to describe how much of each food group we need. We did not include weights because we feel that most women prefer not to spend their time weighing food and calculating the nutritional content of each item. Sometimes, however, it is useful to know just what a new food would contribute to your diet.

Imagine, for example, that you are trying to choose between two brands of breakfast cereal. The short list below suggests how much of each food group we need, in grams (usually written simply as ‘g’). With these figures in mind, you can look at the amounts written on the Nutritional Information of the two cereals and see what proportion of that need would be met by an average portion of each one.

Each day during pregnancy the average woman needs:

about 51g protein

about 18g fibre

as little sugar as possible – ideally no more than 50g

as little saturated fat as possible – certainly no more than 23g

no more than 53g of other fats

about 15mg (milligrams) of iron

about 2,000kcal of energy – or 8,100kJ (with an additional 200kcal during the last three months).

But things are not always as they appear! Sometimes interpreting food labels needs a bit of detective work.