With a little care, you can minimize the risk that you or others will develop a food-borne illness.
Part I of this topic reviewed the relationship of diet to health and provided recommendations for choosing foods and planning diets that contribute to health. The healthiest diets are based on a variety of plant foods—whole grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes, and nuts. Animal products and added fats and oils, sugars, and other sweeteners are best consumed in small quantities. The Food Guide Pyramid reviewed earlier in this topic graphically emphasizes the proportions of these foods in the daily diet. Accordingly, we have arranged this section with priority given to grains, fruits, and vegetables—those items that should predominate at every meal and that most people need to consume in greater quantities. Animal products—meat and other high-protein foods and dairy foods—are also discussed. However, these are the foods that should make up relatively smaller parts of our diets.
Part II introduces you to many foods from which you can choose and provides you with knowledge about the nutrients these foods have to offer. In addition, we provide information about the sources of the foods you purchase and eat—the individual plants and animals, how they are processed to the products that appear on store shelves, and some of the history of these foods in our diet.
Before we introduce the foods themselves, we want to explain the arrangement and presentation of food items in these sections. Because this topic is written for a North American audience, we have included food products that are available to most North Americans. Within the sections on Fruits and Vegetables, we have listed items by their common names in alphabetical order; when a food has more than one common name, the index should help in locating the item. Where there is a difference between the cultural or common use or perception of an item and its botanical nature, we have listed it according to common usage and mentioned the difference in the text. For example, although cucumbers, eggplant, squash, and tomatoes are botanically fruits, they are listed within the vegetable section, because most American consumers think of them as vegetables.
The nutrient compositions of foods are derived from the current version of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient composition database. This database is maintained and updated regularly by USDA laboratories and is the basis of most systems for estimating the nutrient content of foods and diets.
