Score Your Diet...

I chose to do the "score your diet" option for our EYE OPENER this week.

You can experience this took for yourself by clicking here.

Score your diet takes into account various foods that you eat, how often, if they are organic, etc. and gives you a score in 3 categories, health, environmental impact and animal welfare.

My scores were as folllows

Health Score     86
Environmental Score      -17
Animal Welfare score     -5

this left me with a final score of 64

The scoring levels were...
60 =  excellent
15-59 = good
15 or less = Uh, oh, you need help.

As far as the type of food that scored the highest is fruits and veggies a "grand total" of 38 each.
Why was this my highest?  I make an effort to eat fruits and veggies.  I would like to add more variety in fruit. I eat more bananas than anything else.  I also try to have veggies as or as part of snacks and meals. I put that I eat 14 servings a week.  I believe that is true.  I know that some weeks it is well above that and some it is below. And, honestly, I am probably not as familiar with a serving size as I should be.   At 14 a week I feel so sad that, this is it.   I have read studies that suggest 9-12 servings a day and here is an article from Harvard School of Public Heath that says 5-13 per day.  I have heard doctors who study nutrition say 13 should be the norm especially if you are eating foods that have traveled and are growing in depleted soil. I am making an effort to eat local as well as organically grown veggies from farmers who are treating their soil well.

I appreciate that they took potatoes and iceberg lettuce out of the vegetables category. It adds validity to the test for me.

My lowest score went to sweets. A -9.  My other lowest were my meat consumption of a grand total of -6 for all 3 types. Most weeks I don't eat beef and I rarely eat pork but I wanted to add them.  Sweets....  not at my high point and where I want to be right now. Looking over my history, however, I'm doing pretty good.

I was thinking as I was trying to calculate my sweet intake.  My sweets look very different than they did years ago. My Bavarian cream doughnut and mocha would have counted as 2 sweets many years ago when  I ate them for breakfast all too often. Now my sweets on rare occasion are a gluten free muffin, and more often than that, these little candies that I found that contain only honey, mint and cocoa.

They are AMAZING!  Categorizing them as 1 and the doughnut as 1 are not exactly an equal point when I think about it.

My environmental score was -17.
My fruit and veggie consumption are the highest score in that column. To improve that, I would guess eating veggies and fruits as local as I can get would help reduce the negative impact.    Continue to eat meat that has been grown in good and appropriate conditions is important to keep that number down.  I am surprised to see whole grains have a minimal impact on the environment in this scale.  So, perhaps I could add some quality grains more often.  Cutting the little dairy out I do it would also reduce the number... depending on what I replaced it with, of course.

I find it interesting that candy category has no environmental impact.  I totally recognize that there is no way to quantify that with all it's variables on a specific quiz. It could just leave some to the wrong conclusion if they didn't understand the issues correctly.... "Eat pastries for planet earth!"  :)

So, what does this all mean to me?
It is good to put thought into my food. I do this a lot due to a gluten sensitivity and other food considerations so food doesn't pass my lips without some thought. This is a good reminder to me that I want to be taking a better look at the food I eat and figure out how to incorporate more fruits and veggies with greater ease, especially with time spent at school.

I hope that I am accurate with my estimates. I would like to do some tracking of what and the sizes to ensure that I'm really where I think I am at.

I really like that it looks at our impact on the environment and on animals. It is nice to have that included to see where I might be able to change things. It is also interesting that there is no PERFECT, non impacting way to eat.  According to this if you eat fruits and veggies, as is best, you have an impact on the environment. It would be interesting if it took composting into consideration as well, just to add another piece of the puzzle.

It was a good, mind provoking exercise.