Introduction

      The first edition of Nutrition For Dummies in 1997 began by noting that once upon a time, people simply sat down to dinner, eating to fill up an empty stomach or just for the pleasure of it. Nobody said, “Wow, that cream soup is loaded with calories,” or asked whether the bread was a high-fiber loaf or fretted about the chicken being served with the skin still on. No longer. Today, the dinner table can be a battleground between health and pleasure. You plan your meals with the precision of a major general moving his troops into the front lines, and for most people, the fight to eat what’s good for you rather than what tastes good has become a lifelong struggle.

      The six editions since then, including this one, have added new information designed to end the war between your need for good nutrition and your equally compelling need for tasty meals, with the facts and figures from nutrition researchers who continue to make it ever more clear that what’s good for you can also be good to eat — and vice versa.

About This Book

      Nutrition For Dummies, 7th Edition, doesn’t aim to send you back to the classroom, sit you down, and make you take notes about what to put on the table every day from now until you’re 104 years old. You’re reading a reference book, so you don’t have to memorize anything — when you want more info, just jump in anywhere to look it up.

      Instead, this book means to give you the information you need to make wise food choices — which always means choices that please the palate and soul as well as the body. Some of what you’ll read here is really, really basic: definitions of vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and, yes, plain (and not so plain) water. You’ll also read tips about how to put together a nutritious shopping list and how to use food to make meals so good you can’t wait to eat them.

For those who know absolutely nothing about nutrition except that it deals with food, this book is a starting point. For those who know more than a little about nutrition, this book is a refresher course to bring you up to speed on what has happened since the last time you checked out a calorie chart.

      For those who want to know absolutely everything, this edition of Nutrition For Dummies is up to date with hot new info from the 2020 revisions of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and all the twisty “this is good for you” and “this is not” bits and pieces of food info that nutrition scientists have come up with since, well, the last edition.

      Wherever you are on your nutrition-information journey, know that some small parts of this book are fun or informative but not necessarily vital to your understanding of nutrition. For example:

Foolish Assumptions

      Every book is written with a particular reader in mind, and this