Food Diary Analysis Paper

After you have your data and calculations finished, you need to analyze and interpret your data and write a typed summary of what you learned.  This means you are looking for meaning in your numbers.  Here are some questions you can address, but your paper should not be a list of responses to these questions.  These are just some ideas of what you could talk about in your paper.  Organize your thoughts in a way that makes the paper make sense.

• What did your data and calculations tell you?
• After looking at that information, what lifestyle changes might be a good idea?
• How accurate do you think your food list is, including the serving sizes?  How does that impact the quality of the information you got out of this project?
• How close or how far off do you think your RDA value for Calories (from www.nutritiondata.com) is, and explain why you think so?
• For the nutritional categories of your diet that you researched, where did your foods appear to be too high or too low?
• What extra nutrition categories did you research, and why did you find that one to be relevant?
• What foods on your food diary seem especially healthy or especially unhealthy according to your nutrition research?  Why?
• What specific foods could you ADD to your diet to bring up anything that you’re low on?
• What specific foods might you consider REDUCING (or eliminating) to make your diet healthier?   What is it about those foods that is unhealthy?
• Pick a food in your list that you think is unhealthy – what would be a substitute for that food that you would consider occasionally eating instead?  Or, what would be a different way of preparing that food or a different recipe that would be healthier?
• If we were doing a more detailed analysis of your food diary, what other things would you want to look at?  Why?
• What is a positive thing about your diet habits during those three days?
• How will this affect the way you look at food labels or choose foods at certain times in the future?
• How highly processed are the foods you eat?

Food Diary Grading:

You need to hand in three things for the food diary project:

25 pts: Food diary grid with nutrition info, totals, daily averages, RDA, %RDA

10 pts:  Energy Intake Sheet

20 pts:  Food Diary Analysis Paper