How to use Canada's Food Guide

If you include the number of servings of food recommended in Canada's Food Guide, you'll have little appetite left for the chips and junk food. Still, the Guide does provide you with enough latitude to keep your diet interesting.

• The key is to make the right choices within each food group.
• Your daily nutrient intake should lean heavily on fruits and veggies (between seven and 10 servings per day for adults), with grains coming up a very close second (six to eight servings).
• Dairy meats, or alternatives should clock in at two or three servings per day.

• For fruit, a good approach it to put it where you can see it. People are more likely to eat fruit that's in a bowl on a counter than in a refrigerator.
• As for grains, eat mostly whole grains that are high in fibre.
• Because most fibre leaves the body undigested, your body doesn't absorb the calories it contains.
• Dairy? Lower-fat varieties provide the same beneficial nutrients as their full-fat brethren, without the fat and calories.
• As for meats, trim the fat and choose leaner, choice cuts rather than prime.
• For chicken and its ilk, white meat is lower in fat than dark, and removing the skin is a foolproof way to decrease the fat.

Canada's Food Guide includes a section on oils and fats, which states that it's best to stick with oils like canola, olive or soy, and to limit your use of butter, hard margarine, lard and shortening.

• Wrong. Researchers now know that not all calories are the same: Calories from fat are the worst, since they are more efficiently stored as fat in the body than are calories from carbohydrates or protein.
• And a diet high in fat — especially the saturated fat found in animal products — raises blood cholesterol levels and increases the likelihood of developing certain cancers. Regular exercise can be extremely, effective in weight control.
• In fact, study after study, shows that dieting alone can help people lose weight — but that exercise is needed to keep it off.
• By making some minor substitutions, you can significantly reduce the amount of fat in your diet.