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 Eating right means in practice eating wisely.
Neither the abundance of food, nor the high cost of food in the family still determines whether a person is eating well or poorly.
Often everything is in the house, except ... order. The products are good, but they are used unwisely and chaotically. As a result, overeating, and the "dominance" of favorite dishes, and forgetting others, perhaps more useful.
All of this can be avoided if meals are planned. It is within the power of every hostess to think over and make a menu for the day, for the week.
Correctly constructed daily ration, i.e. menu, is the basis of a balanced diet.
Many, however, are little familiar with the rules for compiling a daily diet and make serious mistakes in their menu. And, as studies show, the number of names of dishes during the day for many is small, often repeated throughout the week, which leads to monotony and monotony of food.
Many for months, and sometimes years, include in their diet about the same favorite "family" dishes from a limited, as a rule, assortment of consumed products (for example, pasta, cereals, only a few types of vegetables, etc.). This happens because many housewives, as shown by the survey, know only a small number of dishes.
The menu is often compiled depending on the available random products, purchased without any preliminary plan, and in order to save time, food is often prepared for 2-3 days.
And even in canteens, dishes are often selected "if only", without taking into account what was for breakfast or will be for dinner; as a result, some are dominated by meat food, others have flour or cereal, etc.
What are the basic rules that should be followed when drawing up a menu?
Meals, in order for it to be complete and healthy, must be planned and not only for individual meals, but for the whole day. Only under this condition it is possible to achieve the desired selection and correct alternation of products and dishes that will give our body all the necessary substances.
However, it is most advisable to build a diet based on a week (or a decade), and not for one day, since only then can you truly diversify your diet.
 Making a menu for a week allows you to free yourself from a kind of "dictate" of housewives (they often impose their tastes on others), take into account the tastes of all family members and, along with everyone's "favorite" dishes, give dishes that are not yet very pleasant, but complete and healthy.
When drawing up a menu for the day and for the week, one should proceed from the average daily food sets, which are recommended for people of different ages and professions by the Institute of Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The daily diet for non-strenuous physical work, for example, should include: meat (meat or fish products) - about 200 g, milk or dairy products (kefir, etc.) - about 0.5 liters, bread and bread products - 400-500 g, sugar - 50-100 g, potatoes - about 300 g, other vegetables - 400 g, cereals - 40 g, vegetable oil - 20-30 g, animal fats (in addition to fats included in food) - 10-15 g, eggs - 1 piece every two days.
If necessary, you can replace some products with others, more or less equivalent: meat - fish, milk, cottage cheese, partly peas, beans; animal oil - sour cream, cream, lard; cereals - bread, potatoes, pasta. It is only important to include in the menu every day something from all the main food groups.
The given list of products does not take into account, of course, the individual characteristics of the organism and is therefore only indicative.
Based on the calculation of the weekly norm per person, a seven-day menu should be drawn up, taking into account the peculiarities of nutrition and national cuisine in various republics and regions of our country.
In order for the menu to be varied, it is desirable that the range of dishes be completely renewed during the week. The seven-day menu is seven different breakfasts, seven different lunches, seven different dinners.
When compiling a menu, you need to take care that the same dishes are repeated as rarely as possible. You need to alternate dishes from different products and diversify each product. Many of the dishes themselves allow for a very wide variety, for example, such as "vegetable", "meat" or "fish" dish. Each of these names includes a wide variety of different dishes. All kinds of poultry can be widely used. It is necessary to diversify the set of cereals and vegetables. Gotta change sauces and gravy.
It is advisable to alternate not only certain types of products and vary their preparation, but also the composition of individual dishes should be as varied as possible. This will serve as a guarantee that this food will not become boring. New unfamiliar products and dishes should be widely included in the menu. So, it is useful for the hostess to make it a rule to cook some still unknown dish every week, especially from a product that is rarely used.
Based on the set of products, the number of products for the week is calculated, which in various combinations are distributed over the menu. In this case, you should adhere to the correct combination and alternation of dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
It is necessary to ensure that the composition of breakfast, lunch and dinner includes products of all main groups - meat and fish, dairy, vegetables and fruits, etc.
For breakfast, you can recommend a dish of meat or fish with a side dish, tea or coffee, bread and butter or cheese; some like to eat porridge in the morning.
For lunch - some vegetable dish or sausages, sausages or an egg, tea with a sandwich, milk, kefir.
Lunch usually consists of several courses. Salads are good for an appetizer or the vinaigrette... The first and second courses should complement each other. So, if the soup is cereal, then the side dish of the second course should be vegetable. On the third compote or fruit.
 For dinner, it is advisable to cook dairy, cereal and vegetable dishes. An elderly person can be recommended to additionally drink a glass of tea with a bun or cookies, kefir, yogurt before going to bed.
When compiling the menu, a nomograph can be of great help, with the help of which it is easy to determine the individual requirements for calorie content of food, as well as for basic nutrients. Using then the table, which indicates the composition of the most important products and their calorie content (or a table of the composition and calorie content of individual dishes), you can easily calculate the approximate energy value and chemical composition of the daily diet.
When compiling the menu, consider the season. In summer, for example, there is a wider range of dairy products, berries, herbs; in autumn, the menu will be diversified by various varieties of fresh fish, poultry, vegetables, mushrooms, fruits; in the spring you need to take care of early greenery. Therefore, it is advisable to draw up seasonal menus: summer-autumn and winter-spring.
A pre-made menu will undoubtedly simplify your cooking work. We must pay attention to the fact that our food is easy to prepare, does not require excessive spending of time by the hostess. Therefore, it is better to use semi-finished products, canned food and concentrates in the diet, not to cook often time-consuming dishes, and to combine more complex dishes with simpler, quick-cooked ones. When drawing up the menu, one must take into account the time it will take to prepare one or another dish. So, for breakfast, when every minute is precious, it is better to use such dishes, the preparation of which does not require a lot of time (cottage cheese with sour cream, scrambled eggs and etc.).
When designing a menu, you need to pay attention to the fact that the food fits the family's budget. For this purpose, more expensive products should be combined with cheaper ones, giving preference to the most biologically valuable and nutritious products. It is known that more expensive products from a physiological point of view are often less valuable than cheaper ones. As an example, you can compare products made from high-grade wheat flour and rye or gray bread.
Some people unreasonably think that rationalizing food always requires additional costs. In fact, this is not the case.
Indeed, if you more widely include in your diet foods that, as noted above, are still underestimated by many, the economic gain is undeniable. For milk is cheaper than sausages, cottage cheese, cheese and fish are cheaper than meat, and even more so poultry, vegetable fats are cheaper than animals, herbs and vegetables are very cheap.
Therefore, our food can and should be simple and inexpensive, but tasty, varied and complete.
L. V. Baranovsky - 5 mistakes in our diet
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