HM’s Food & Wine Magazine

House to house diet surveys has largely been contributing a lot to collect information about food consumption, the number of members with their age and sex, monthly income of the family etc. The gathered information can be helpful to derive the quantity of per capita foodstuff consumption in the family and calculate the nutrients intake and hence improve their quality and quantity to a healthy level. To improve people’s diet consumption, the direction should be limited by family income, and if the ideal level is impossible to attain, economically feasible measures must be attempted. A wide choice of cheap and healthy variety of foodstuff is available in the country and adjustment should be greatly helpful in correcting dietary inadequacies.

In improving diets and drawing up satisfactory diet schedules as found from surveys, works out as given in following table. With reference to the table which follows later, the nutritive value of such a diet has been worked out, and given in the same table:

Composition of an average diet and its approximate nutritive values:

The above given diet is insufficient in quantity and fails to supply the necessary requirement of the most of the food factors enumerated is unbalanced. As already stated, it is typical of diets consumed by millions people. Most families consume single cereal as their staple food. But above nutritive value has been calculated on the assumption that the intake is composed of a mixture of cereals. The leafy vegetables, fresh foods and fruits listed above are consumed by only few families occasionally. The nutritive value of the diet consumed in a good number of families might be much worse than what is shown above.

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