One Serving

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.

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 version 0.3 ‘Weefz’s Show Post Subcategories‘ from the WordPress Plugins Directory (or see below for version 0.4).

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 2.7.0. It doesn’t do anything fancy, so should work with earlier 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 ;)

Update 8th June 2009: Plugin is now on version 0.4. By popular request, it now allows you to display subcategories without any separator. Just use the following:

<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories('','','','your parent category id') ?>

It’s temporarily available here until I find the time to upload it properly to the WordPress Plugins directory.

What Is This Site?

by Debbie

Near my workplace, there’s this great sandwich place where you get to make your own lunch using their fresh ingredients. It’s perfect for me because I can’t stand lettuce. Those leaves make their way into so many sandwiches. I know I need to eat more vegetables, so I started piling on the sliced mushrooms. One day it occured to me – I had absolutely no idea how many mushrooms I was really eating. They were all sliced up. I had no way to tell if I was getting one serving or five. So, I turned to the Internet. You know what I found?

Nothing.
(…click to read the full article)