Manchester City Library

March is National Nutrition Month! This annual campaign, created by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, was created to encourage everyone to learn about making informed food choices and developing healthy eating and physical activity habits. This year, the focus is “Personalize your Plate”.

So what does it mean to Personalize your Plate? Well, a big part of healthy eating is to figure out what nutrition plan works best for you. Healthy eating is not a one-size fits all endeavor. Maybe your healthy eating plan must be built around a vegan or vegetarian diet, or maybe high cholesterol is a consideration. Or maybe you really hate beans and never want to see them on your plate. Personalize Your Plate promotes creating nutritious meals that meet an individuals’ cultural and personal food preferences.

To that end, we’ve put together some resources to help you get started. Check out the list of books below, or click this link to go directly to the catalog. There are also a number of websites that are full of helpful information to help you personalize your plate.

Eatright.org

This is the home base of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and National Nutrition month. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics provides games, videos, tips, as well as a celebration toolkit with resources and ideas for school, work and home.

Nutrition.gov

This USDA-sponsored website serves as a portal for food and nutrition information for the public. It contains information on dietary supplements, nutrition for different ages, nutrition for specific health conditions, and meal preparation.

Foodsafety.gov

This website is a portal to information about food safety from sources across the federal government. It contains information on safe storage and preparation of food and provides up-to-date information on food recalls and alerts.

Food Topics

https://www.fda.gov/Food

This topic page on the FDA website contains a wealth of information on nutrition, including information on dietary supplements, tools for understanding food labels, food safety, case studies for health professionals, and the Education Resource Library.

Food and Nutrition Information Center

https://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic

The Food and Nutrition Information Center contains information about diet for specific health conditions, dietary reference intakes, information on nutrition for populations (preconception, child, older adults) and links out to other resources presented in the first webinar.

Choose My Plate

https://www.choosemyplate.gov/

USDA’s ChooseMyPlate provides nutrition infographics, a link to dietary guidelines, SuperTracker, Pregnancy weight gain calculator, preschooler growth charts, lesson plans for educators, and multilingual nutrition tip sheets.

Medline Plus: Food and Nutrition

https://medlineplus.gov/foodandnutrition.html

This collection of pages in MedlinePlus is focused on the topic of Food & Nutrition. Check out some of these topics and get a feel for this resource!

Food for Thought Guide

https://nnlm.gov/psr/guides/food4thought

This online guide contains a list of resources from the USDA, FDA, CDC and the National Library of Medicine on topics related to food and nutrition.

Healthy Living Guide 2020/2021

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has released a Health Living Guide that focuses on the unique challenges we face to stay healthy during a global pandemic. This free, downloadable issue includes information on the Immune system, strategies for eating healthy on a budget, diet reviews, and information on how stress and sleep affect eating patterns.