One Serving

March 2008 Update

by Debbie

Lots of progress this month. More fruit, more veg and more nuts. I noticed in the site stats that some poor soul was searching repeatedly for the serving size of baby spinach. It wasn’t there at the time but I’ve made sure that it is now - One Serving of Raw Baby Spinach

Rather excitingly, we’re also now open for contributions! As I mentioned last month, I’d started posting food preparation suggestions. If you know any food tips, here’s your chance to share them with fellow chefs. Write a post explaining the best way to slice onions (for example) and we’ll publish it alongside the serving size information for all related food. Even if your technique seems is really simple and obvious (like grating zest) chances are that someone has been doing it the hard way for years. I know I learned an incredible number of tricks from Ready Steady Cook when I was a student.

Here’s how it works in ten easy steps.

1. Sign up as a One Serving Contributor. You’ll need a valid email address to get your password.
2. Check your email for the password
3. Log in and change your password to something you’ll remember
4. Write your post.
5. Upload pictures, if you like.
6. Choose your category - Articles, Recipes or Tips.
7. In the tags box, type in the name of the food that your tip relates to. If we already have a serving size for that food, it will show up in a clickable list. If not, no worries. We’ll add it soon.
8. Click on Submit.
9. We’ll give the post a quick skim and approve it - it’s not that we don’t trust you but sadly, there are spammers all over the Internet these days.
10. Your tip will be displayed for all our visitors.

Easy, no? If you want more info on how the posting section works, check out WordPress Codex - Writing Posts. I’ll publish an FAQ soon with a privacy policy and guidelines - in the meantime, drop any questions in the comments here or use the contact form to get in touch with me.

Finally, if you like to share recipes then here’s the perfect website for you. I discovered Forkd last week, a brilliant new site that lets people share recipes and photos. My Forkd profile page has a few recipes that I’ve posted and I’ll be writing more as soon as I get around to actually measuring those ingredients ;) Add me to your favourite chefs if you sign up.

What Really Counts As One Serving?

by Debbie

How big is one serving or portion? Good question. It depends on what you’re eating. Food can be put into 5 different groups: Fruit and Vegetables; Starch, Grains and Cereals; Nuts and Seeds; Proteins and Fats, Oils and Sugar. Each group has a different set of nutritional requirements.

Fruit and Vegetables

Common wisdom says you should eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Problem is, how big is a serving?

According to the World Health Organisation, adults should eat a minimum of 400g (14 ounces) of fruit and vegetables every day to help stave off chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity.

In other words, one serving or portion of fruit and vegetables is 80 grams. That’s 2.8 ounces. Eat five portions every day and you’ll hit your daily target.

Great. But what’s that in real terms?

Ah, now you’ve hit the crux of our site. Have a look around. You’ll find photos of one measured serving of all kinds of fruit and vegetables, along with their calorie counts, glycaemic load and a load of other useful information. Here are some to get you started:

• One Serving of Tangerines
• One Serving of Pepper (Capsicum)

Nuts and Seeds

Nuts and seeds are a huge segment of food. You’ll find all sorts of nutrients in different seeds, so it’s not appropriate to use a general weight measurement for serving size. Instead, we’ve settled on 160 to 180 calories as a reasonable amount of energy to eat in one sitting.

Have a look at these pages to see how different 170-odd calories can look from seed to seed:

• One Serving of Shelled Pistachios
• One Serving of Brazil Nuts

Proteins

According to dietician and nutritionist, Dr Mabel Blades, one serving of meat is approximately 100 to 150 grams of uncooked meat, or 3.5 to 5 ounces. This will shrink depending on how the meat is cooked.

We’ll update this post to include the other foods groups in the next couple of weeks.

February 2008 Update

by Debbie

Monthly updates are probably the best way to let you all know what’s going on, right? In that case, I’d like to welcome you to our first monthly update.

What’s new this month? Well, I’ve started posting little food suggestions and things. The idea is that not only do you get to find out portion sizes and nutrients, below each info page will be a collection of quick tips that I’ve come across, some basic recipes and other foodie hints. Hopefully you’ll run into one or two things that you hadn’t thought of doing before.

As you probably know, we’re focusing on veggie-friendly foods to start with. Your newest additions:

• Peeled Banana
• Raw Lentils
• Baby Corn
• Tangerines
• Mange Tout

We now have a contact page. It’s a form linked from every page so if you want to get in touch for any reason, please use it to send an email straight to my inbox. Of course, you can always just comment on one of these news posts to get the same, slightly more public effect.

Finally, food factoid of the month: Latex allergies can be triggered by completely unrelated fruit like bananas and avocados. Crazy world, hey?

Happy Eating!

WordPress Plugin: Show Post Subcategories

by Debbie

In order to run this site, I need to display the subcategories of a particular category in single post pages. There are a few other people who were also looking to do the same thing, but got no joy. I wrote my own very basic plugin to do the job.

Download ‘Weefz’s Show Post Subcategories‘ from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Here’s how it works:

1. Unzip the download into your Wordpress plugins directory
2. Activate it in the plugins management screen
3. Go to your template editor
4. Within The Loop, add the following tag
<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories(’prefix’,’suffix’,’separator’,'parent category id number’) ?>
5. Replace prefix, suffix and separators with the text of your choice, keeping it within the single quotation marks
6. Replace cat_ID with the ID number of the parent category

For example, say that you want to show the post’s subcategories of category 5 in an unordered list. Use the following tag:

<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories('<ul><li>','</ul>','</li><li>','5') ?>

I have used this with all versions of Wordpress from 2.2.1 to 2.3.3. It doesn’t do anything fancy, so should work with earlier versions. Comment below with your version number if you use it successfully, please. I’ll update the docs to list all tested versions.

Disclaimer: This is my first Wordpress plugin, so please test it out before installing on a live site. I use it myself right here at One Serving - it drives the links to the “High in” nutrient fields for every food serving size post.

Drop me a comment below with any questions or advice. If you like the plugin, feel free to buy me a beer or healthy juice drink with the PayPal button ;)

Still around!

by Debbie

I haven’t updated in a while. Here’s the current plan:

I’m setting up a group of plugins that will let users register and post their tips or recipes without having to plow through hundreds of categories. Once that’s up and running, I’ll open the site to new users and you can start sharing your food ideas with everyone.

Meanwhile…

I was originally going to launch with a bunch of food in every category. Thing is, I am only one person with a full-time job so researching everything all at once is proving to be too much. For the moment, we’re sticking to fruit, vegetables and nuts - the cornerstone of a healthy diet. Once those categories fill out a bit, we’ll start working on the other food groups.

Nutritional Info Is A Go

by Debbie

As you may have noticed, our food pages are starting to appear on the site. We’re started with Fruit and Vegetables. Next on the list is Nuts and Beans, followed by Fats and Sugars, Dairy, Grains and Starches, Animal Proteins, Alcohol and Exercise.

Yes, those last two aren’t exactly your traditional food groups ;) We’re including them so that you can get a complete picture of how healthy your diet and lifestyle is. You can look up what counts as light, moderate or vigorous exercise, as well as how often you should be doing each type.

Here are the first few nutritional information pages.

• Sliced Lemon
• Sliced Pepper
• Whole Windsor Apples
• Whole Tulameen Raspberries
• Whole Cherry Tomatoes
• Sliced Button Mushrooms

What do you think about the info presented? Is there anything important that we’ve left out?

New Site Layout

by Debbie

Yes, I rolled out our new site design slightly earlier than expected. I was excited about finally getting it working, okay? There are still lots of links to add and background things to tweak but this will be the general look and feel.

What do you think?

Hooray for WP2.3!

by Debbie

The upgrade to WordPress 2.3 went swimmingly. We now have tags as well as categories. There’s also an unexpected bonus - the “pending review” post status, which suddenly makes the organisation for this site seem a whole lot easier.

You’ll see the new site design roll out very soon - if not this week then definitely next. Once it’s out there, I’ll write a post explaining exactly how this site will work for you. After that, it’s just putting up the food pictures and we’re live :)