Quantitative Methods - Therapeutic diets

Quantitative Methods: These are often essential for constructing  Lherapeutic diets.  The  two ways by which  this could be done are as follows:

i)  Using  an  exchange system which delivers  a  fixed  amount  of  nutrient per food  portion.  An  example  of  this  is  the  carbohydrate  exchange system  used  in  planning diets  for  insulin  dependent diabetics.  The desired level of  intake  is  specified and  the diet is  constructed  from an exchange list.

ii)  Quantifying the portion size of foods and the  frequency  of  their consumption. This diet is constructed from normal sized portions of foods but those foods which have  the highest content of  a particular nutrient per  portion are excluded from the diet. We learnt about this aspect earlier also, where we got to know about fat, Na and K restricted diets. We also had a look at the permitted  and excluded  food  items  based  on  their  nutrient  content.