Analyze your personal diet – not optional, this is important for your understanding.
Record and analyze your food intake for three 24 hour periods (Computer analysis is preferable, program comes with MindTap.) Analyze the cumulative print-out for three days. Compare your results with the DRI’s. Write yourself a diet prescriiption explaining how you could improve your dietary intakes of nutrients by eating different foods, different eating patterns, etc.
Some students are enrolled in two of DR Mercer’s courses; Sports Nutrition and Nutrition and Disease. If this is you, then you will see the diet analysis project in both courses. You may NOT turn in the same assignment in both courses. You can analyze the same diet but for each class you need to review a different aspect of the diet in your discussion. For example in Sports Nutrition you may look at the topics covered in that class more in-depth and think along the lines of nutrition in relation to exercise, calories burned or dietary choices in relation to metabolism. In Nutrition and Disease you may want to discuss and analyze the diet in relation to overall health or potential health issues that could occur due to identified dietary deficiencies etc. Whatever choice you make your discussion and review should be different so the assignment is clearly different.
There are two goals for this project: 1.) learn the analysis process, and 2.) gain some personal insight about yourself and your food intake. So, as usual, the more of diet analysis information the better in terms of drawing conclusions. The suggested number of pages is just a guideline, not a rule. Tables and graphs are good communication tools but don’t have to be exhaustive.
