About the GDA Diet book

What are GDAs?

Quite simply, GDAs (Guideline Daily Amounts) and GDA labels take the guesswork out of knowing what we should be eating, and make planning a healthy, balanced diet as easy as pie. GDA labels allow you to control everything you eat – and that makes controlling your weight much easier.
When you ask yourself ‘What do I fancy eating today?’ ‘What will the family want for supper?’ you are also making decisions about your fat, sugar, salt and nutrient intake. Every time you go to the supermarket, you have to make decisions about health and nutrition.
Hmmm… now you know that, should you pop the pizza or the pasta in your trolley? (For the answer to that one, see page 25.)The benefit of the GDA system is that a quick glance at the GDA label on the packaging will give you all the nutritional facts you need to help you decide.
At a glance you can:
• CHECK how many calories and how much sugar, fat, saturates and salt are in your food.
• COMPARE this with something else you might fancy.
• CHOOSE the one that’s right for you.
We all know that we need a certain quantity of calories a day. But if we want to keep weight at a healthy level, we can’t afford to keep eating foods that give us more calories than we need. The good news is, there’s GDA information about calories on almost every pack of food, to show you how many calories a portion of food contains and what percentage that is of your daily total. But calories aren't the only thing we need to keep an eye on. So there are GDAs and GDA labels for all the other key nutrients too, including sugars, fat, saturates and salt.