Healthy Eating: Strategies for a healthy diet

Here are some tips for how to choose foods that improve your health and avoid foods that raise your risk for illnesses while creating a diet plan that works for you.
• Eat enough calories but not too many.
• Maintain a balance between your calorie intake and calorie expenditure—that is, don’t eat more food than your body uses. The average recommended daily allowance is 2,000 calories, but this depends on your age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity.
• Eat a wide variety of foods. Healthy eating is an opportunity to expand your range of choices by trying foods—especially vegetables, whole grains, or fruits—that you don’t normally eat.
• Keep portions moderate, especially highcalorie foods. In recent years serving sizes have ballooned, particularly in restaurants. Choose a starter instead of an entrée, split a dish with a friend, and don’t order supersized anything.
• Eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes—foods high in complex carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, low in fat, and free of cholesterol. Try to get fresh, local produce
• Drink more water. Our bodies are about 75% water. It is a vital part of a healthy diet. Water helps flush our systems, especially the kidneys and bladder, of waste products and toxins.

City Doctors on Lookout for Measles

The Health Department has identified 11 cases of measles in Brooklyn during the past two months, and is urging doctors to be vigilant and promptly report suspected cases to the agency.

Nearly all the known cases have occurred in children who went unvaccinated, leaving them unprotected against the disease. Measles is not common in New York City, but it is highly contagious.

“Children should be vaccinated against measles at one year of age,” said Dr. Jane R. Zucker, the Health Department’s assistant commissioner for immunization. “Vaccinating eligible children will protect them and help protect infants who are too young to be vaccinated, by reducing their risk of exposure. Delaying a child’s vaccination increases the risk of contracting measles and infecting others.”

Measles causes fever, rash, cough, runny nose and red eyes. As many as one in three children with measles develop complications such as diarrhea, ear infection or pneumonia. Some children have to be hospitalized, and some can even die. Younger children, and those with weakened immune systems, are the most likely to suffer severe illness. People who contract the measles virus can spread the infection for five days before developing a rash, and for four days after the rash sets in.

Measles vaccination is required for admission to the city’s schools, colleges and daycare centers. The first measles vaccine dose should be given at the time of the child’s first birthday, with the second dose being administered at 4 to 6 years of age. In New York City, approximately 92% of children between the ages of 19 and 35 months have received a measles vaccine.