Eating the Right Portions

Eating the Right Portions

Beware of portion distortion, and help trim down the number of calories you eat each day.

Use these visuals to help you judge what a normal portion size is:
-½ cup of vegetables or fruit is about the size of your fist.
-A medium apple is the size of a baseball.
-A three-ounce portion of meat, fish or poultry is about the size of deck of cards.
-A single-serving bagel is about the size of a hockey puck.
-1 ½ ounces of cheese is the size of a pair of dice.
-One tablespoon of peanut butter is about the size of the tip of your thumb.
-Eating out? Restaurant portions are frequently two to three times larger than normal
portions.

Remember these tips next time you dine out:
-Split an entrée with a friend or save half of it for lunch the next day.
-Have an appetizer and salad or soup as your main course.
-At home, serve appropriate portion sizes, and store the rest for leftovers.
-Avoid eating directly out of a bag or carton.
-Think about buying foods packaged in individual serving sizes to help you control
portions.
-Serve dinner on your smaller salad plates instead of your dinner plates!

Servings of food vs Portion sizes

Understanding Portions vs. Serving Size

• A “portion” is how much food you choose to eat at one time, whether in a restaurant, from a package, or in your own kitchen.
• Portions can be big or small, it depends on how much you choose to eat.
• A serving is a measured amount of food or drink, such as one slice of bread or 8 ounces of milk.
• It is also the amount of food listed on a product’s Nutrition Facts.
• Sometimes, the portion size and serving size match; sometimes they do not.
• Keep in mind that the serving size on the Nutrition Facts is not a recommended amount of food to eat.
• It is a quick way of letting you know the calories and nutrients in a certain amount of food.
• Learning to recognize standard serving sizes can help you judge how much you are eating.
• When cooking for yourself, use measuring cups and spoons to measure your usual food portions and compare them to standard serving sizes from Nutrition Facts of packaged food products for a week or so.
• Put the suggested serving size that appears on the label on your plate before you start eating.
• This will help you see what one standard serving of a food looks like compared to how much you normally eat.

Retrieved by the National Institutes of Health

Eating for Healthy Teeth Tips

Eating for Healthy Teeth Tips

Avoid eating between meals:
-Fewer snacks will lead to less acid exposure for your teeth.
-If you snack, choose foods such as carrot sticks, or celery.

Reduce the consumption of the following beverages:
-Soft drinks or any other drinks that contain sugar.
-Coffee or tea with added sugar, cocoa and lemonade.
-Fruit juices
-The best time to consume them is with you meal.
-These beverages if consumed with a meal exposes your teeth to acids for a
shorter amount of time.

Reduce candy consumption:
-Hard and soft candies have enough sugar to increase the acid produced by bacteria to decay levels.
-Instead use sugarless varieties.

Consume very acidic foods (such as citrus fruits) in moderation:
-These food items can make the mouth more acidic contributing to a loss of minerals in the teeth.
-The effects of acid exposure occur overtime.

Don’t forget to brush:
-Brush your teeth after eating and after drinking sugary drinks.
-This will help remove the plaque bacteria that create the destructive acids.
-If you cannot brush after every meal, brush at least twice a day.

Food items to Consume
Best Food Choices: Cheese, chicken or other meats, or nuts. These foods actually may help protect tooth enamel. They do this by neutralizing acids or by providing the calcium and phosphorus needed to put minerals back in the teeth. Unsweetened tea and water, especially fluoridated water. Tea also has fluoride, which can strengthen tooth enamel. Water helps flush away bits of food. It also can dilute the sugar acids.

Moderate Food choices: Firm fruits such as apples and pears and vegetables contain natural sugars. Their high water content dilutes the effects of the sugars. These fruits also stimulate the flow of saliva, which fights bacteria and helps protect against decay.

Worst Food choices: Candy, cookies, cakes, crackers, breads, muffins, potato chips,
french fries, pretzels, bananas, raisins and other dried fruits. These foods provide
a source of sugar that certain bacteria can use to produce acid. The problem can

Eating for Healthy Teeth

Eating for Healthy Teeth



How eating affects your teeth

• In order to prevent cavities, the number of times you eat is just as important as the type of food you eat.
• Food affects your teeth and mouth even after you consumed a meal.
• Consuming desserts with dinner is less harmful to your teeth compared to when they are consumed as a separate snack.
• Research shows that the consumption of sweets between meals lead to higher rates of tooth decay compared to the consumption of sweets with meals.
• Bacteria in your mouth and on your teeth use simple carbohydrate foods to produce acids that causes tooth decay which lead to cavities.
• It also can have other long-term effects on your mouth.
• Learning how food affects your oral health is the first step toward eating for healthy teeth.
  

The health benefits of sugarfree gum in preventing cavities

• Xylitol is an ingredient in some sugarless gums.
• Research has shown xylitol works to reduce the amount of bacteria in the mouth.
• It also helps to increase the pH of your mouth and teeth making them less acidic.
• Most sugarless gums and sugarless candies increase the production of saliva, which guards your teeth against bacteria.

Eating for Healthy Teeth

Food Safety Brief

What is food borne illness?
-A food borne illness is a disease that is transmitted to humans by food.
-The U.S. Public Health Service classifies moist, high-protein, and/or low acid foods as potentially hazardous.

Who's at risk?
-Infants, young children, pregnant women, the elderly. Also, people who are chronically ill have a greater risk of developing a food borne illness because their immune system may not be able to fight off bacteria and viruses that cause the illness.

What is cross-contamination?
-The transportation of harmful substances to food by: hands that touch food that will not be cooked, such as fresh fruits and vegetables.
-Surfaces, like cutting boards or dish towels, that touch raw foods, are not clean and sanitized, then touch ready-to-eat food.
-Raw or contaminated foods that touch or drip juices on cooked or ready-to-eat foods.
-Food can become contaminated from chemical, physical, or biological sources.
-Chemical hazards = cleaning solutions and sanitizers
-Physical hazards = foreign particles, like glass or metal
-Biological hazards = mainly produced by microorganism including viruses, parasites and bacteria

Conditions that encourage bacteria to grow
-Bacteria can live in hotter and colder temperatures than humans, but they do best in a warm, moist, protein-rich environment that is pH neutral or low acid.
-There are some exceptions; some bacteria thrive in extreme heat or cold.
-Some bacteria grow fastest in the temperature range between 41F (5C) and 140F (60C), which is known as the Temperature Danger Zone “TDZ”.

Handling food safely
-Food handling practices are risky when they allow harmful bacteria to contaminate and grow in food
-Your hands can be the most potentially dangerous serving equipment you use.
-Scratching you scalp, running your fingers through your hair, or touching a pimple can cause the transmission of pathogenic microorganisms that may cause disease
-If you touch a food during preparation, you may transfer several thousand bacteria to its surface
-A cough or sneeze can transmit thousands of microorganisms that may cause disease.
-The most important tool you have to prevent food borne illness is good personal hygiene.
-Personal hygiene is the way a person maintains their health, appearance and cleanliness.

Closing of Peter's Place - Sample letter sent to all Members of NYC Council

February 3, 2009

Hon. Bill de Blasio
Member of the NYC Council
250 Broadway, 17th Floor
New York, NY 10007

Re: Closing of Peter’s Place


I’m writing to let you know that, with great sadness, the Partnership for the Homeless will be closing Peter’s Place – our city’s only drop-in center specializing in the needs of older homeless adults – on June 30, 2009. While it has been a critical safe harbor for homeless seniors since 1993, the Department of Homeless Services, through its new RFP, has decided to reduce the total number of Drop-in Centers city-wide from nine to five, and completely eliminate funding for specialized centers like Peter’s Place.

As a result, New York City seniors, who’ve fallen prey to homelessness, will now be relegated to one of five overburdened centers, forcing them to navigate a confusing and often unsafe network of homeless services designed for a more physically able population. Without Peter’s Place, seniors will clearly face special challenges within the city’s shelter or drop-in center environments, putting them at-risk for victimization, with a staff not always well-prepared to effectively meet their geriatric needs.

And though the needs of seniors are obviously significantly different from their younger counterparts, the Department of Homeless Services is making no distinction between the two. Rather, the Department of Homeless Services, in a stunningly simplistic approach, is only concerned with broad social categories in which older homeless adults are subsumed without special notice (e.g., “chronically homeless”, disabled persons, veterans).

Having developed real expertise in helping homeless seniors over the past 15 years, we’re especially concerned about how this very vulnerable and unique group of New Yorkers will be served moving forward. Requiring these individuals to enter the drop-in system with a general population may likely result in these individuals opting out of the system and remaining exposed to the risks of life on the street. By ignoring their distinct concerns, we are putting hundreds of homeless older New Yorkers at risk.

Please know though that the Partnership is absolutely committed to continuing to serve homeless and at-risk seniors throughout our city. In fact, we’re currently working with experts and academics in the field to develop a homeless prevention program for seniors, modeled after a NORC, without Department of Homeless Services’ funding. Nonetheless, we believe that the loss of Peter’s Place will leave a substantial gap in services for homeless seniors, many of whom
have become homeless, for the first time, in their 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The Partnership certainly had hoped that, alongside a newly developed prevention program, we could continue to serve homeless seniors through either the Department of Homeless Services’ Safe Haven or Drop-in Center programs. While we have a new site and community board approval for a safe haven, the Department of Homeless Services informed us that there were no longer any funds available.

We, of course, know that these are terrible economic times, but believe, precisely because of these times, there’s a special need to continue our work with homeless seniors. Today, more and more New York City seniors are finding it difficult to hold on to their homes and, consequently, are increasingly at-risk for homelessness, with many falling over the precipice. In fact, nearly one-quarter of all senior-headed households in New York City now earn an annual income below $10,000.

We thus hope that the Council will intervene to restore these critical services. Specifically, we request that you use your budget oversight authority to require the city, and its Department of Homeless Services, to:

Provide capital funding to the Partnership to open a Safe Haven for seniors at our new proposed site, and
Provide a minimum of 24 months of operating expenses for the new Safe Haven.

With a new site, the Partnership will work tirelessly to transition our seniors from Peter’s Place in Chelsea to our new location, and reach out to vulnerable older adults in our new neighborhood. As always, we will work diligently to find permanent housing for seniors, as well as provide them with the support services they need to thrive in their new homes.

We hope you will join with us in our efforts to effectively serve homeless seniors during these very difficult times, and are available to meet with you to discuss restoration of this critical city service. Please feel free to contact me at 212.645.3444.


Sincerely,


Arnold S. Cohen
President & CEO