Quantitative Methods - Therapeutic diets
Quantitative Methods: These are often essential for constructing Lherapeutic diets. The two ways by which this could be done are as follows:
i) Using an exchange system which delivers a fixed amount of nutrient per food portion. An example of this is the carbohydrate exchange system used in planning diets for insulin dependent diabetics. The desired level of intake is specified and the diet is constructed from an exchange list.
ii) Quantifying the portion size of foods and the frequency of their consumption. This diet is constructed from normal sized portions of foods but those foods which have the highest content of a particular nutrient per portion are excluded from the diet. We learnt about this aspect earlier also, where we got to know about fat, Na and K restricted diets. We also had a look at the permitted and excluded food items based on their nutrient content.