As most of you would know, Deliciously Clean Eats is a Local, Fresh, Dietitian Created company. Through various marketing avenues and on the DCE website, you may have noticed the term ‘Dietitian Approved’. What does this actually mean and how does this make a DCE meal one that will help you live your best, most balanced, nourished and time filled life? Let me break it down for you.
Balanced meals
First let’s chat about ‘balanced meals’. Having a balanced meal encourages sustainable habits. Sustainable habits mean you integrate changes into your lifestyle; they become your norm. It means you maintain meal enjoyment, satiety and can continue living your best life, essentially the opposite outcome of a fad diet. Fad diets take changes to the extreme, often not being maintainable or able to integrate into your life, so you go back to square one.
Sustainable habits will look different for everyone, but here at DCE we aim to support sustainable habits by producing balanced meals that include 1 serving of protein, 1 serving of carbohydrate and 1-2 servings of vegetables. The daily recommended serving of vegetables is about 5 servings, so our meals help you to get some of your servings in for the day!
We understand everyone’s busy and may not have time to prepare 3 different types of vegetables everyday so we try to take the hassle out so you can just enjoy a delicious meal that you know is actually good for you.
Nutrition Information Communication
This leads in to DCE’s communication of the nutrition information of meals. We use a program called FoodWorks to create nutrition information panels. FoodWorks uses gold standard data analysis of food composition and allows you to input recipes, evaluate the nutrition science and create a nutrition information panel. These panels tell you the ingredients of each meal, how much energy they provide, how much protein, fat and carbohydrates are in each meal. Each meal is weighed out which ensures quality control and accuracy from meal to meal. Every meal also requires a package date and a time frame of when to eat the meal to ensure the meals are enjoyed as fresh as possible and to comply with FSANZ labelling regulations.
Healthy Cooking Procedures
The food is so delicious, but how is it actually cooked? This is something I was interested in finding out because when cooking in bulk it adds a level of logistics to any cooking process. Well, you’d be relieved to know that we try not to add any fat or oil when cooking our protein or vegetables, if we do need to use any oil, we opt for olive oil. This has many health benefits including providing healthy fats, containing antioxidants, and digestive health. When cooking meat, the fat is removed to ensure it is lean as possible. And finally, we add herbs and spices to our meals to add extra flavour without compromising nutrition value or adding any nasties.
Alternatives for meals
We provide many alternatives for our meals, such as: lower carb, dairy free, gluten free, vegetarian, and vegan options. We often use tofu in our vegetarian meals as a protein source as it has many health benefits which include containing antioxidants, having a complete amino acid profile, as well as providing fibre, potassium, iron, and magnesium.
Introducing vegetarian options into your diet can reduce your risk of becoming overweight or obese, reduce the risk of heart disease, help bring blood pressure down, and help the environment as well! Meatless Monday is a fun way to incorporate new vegetarian meals that you may have never thought to try! Sticking to a routine will also help make good habits and encourage others around you!
You can rest assured knowing that any meal you order from us will be healthy, delicious and what it actually means for your meals to be ‘Dietitian Approved’.
By Evelyn Reeves
USC Nutrition Student