Lynch - The right bite: smart food choices for eating on the go

The Right Bite is your solution to those difficult moments when youre faced with temptation and wondering what to eat or drink. Most of us have a fairly clear idea of what healthy eating is all about, and its not difficult to stick to a few key healthy principles when youre cooking at home and in control of the ingredients and the portion size. When youre out and about its another story.

No one wants to be a party pooper, whatever the occasion whether its a quick coffee with friends, a celebration in a bar or a family picnic or barbecue. The challenge is how to join in and treat yourself without ruining the efforts that you make the rest of the time to keep things fairly healthy.

This is where The Right Bite can help by offering a specific solution to your dining dilemmas. Each chapter guides you through everyday social contexts, identifying the potential pitfalls of some choices and highlighting the advantages of others, making it both simple and clear how to identify The Right Bite in any given situation.

Each of the chapters starts with an overview and then has features on individual foods. These features introduce the food, highlight the health pros and cons of that food, and include a series of information boxes. You can read all the features and become more informed quickly or you can save time by going straight to the food thats most relevant to you.

This section offers a clear breakdown of how carbohydrate (including fibre, starch and sugar), protein and fats work in the body and explores current thinking on their impact on health. You might like to check back to this section, from time to time, to get some more detail on the nutrients discussed in each chapter.

At the start of each chapter there is a nutritional overview that draws out some of the key themes of the chapter, so you know what to expect. From there, the chapter contains a series of sections, made up of an introductory text to the food and different information boxes The Right Bite, Nutrition Numbers and two fact boxes to help you navigate your way through the material.

If youre in a hurry, then just skip straight to this box in each food feature, as it offers a speedy solution. It will tell you all you need to know about the best thing to pick in that context, so that you can happily tuck into your muffin, cake, burger or other snack, confident in the knowledge that youre managing to limit the potential damage.

For those who enjoy detail, theres plenty of opportunity to delve down into the nutritional information in the Nutrition Numbers box. This provides a breakdown of the principal and most relevant nutrients in the specific foods, displayed in grams, which allow for greater accuracy than imperial measurements. Where a nutrient is absent, it does not mean that it doesnt feature in the food, simply that the featured nutrients are either present in far greater quantity or are especially relevant to a particular health benefit or health risk. Where it refers to manufactured or pre-prepared foods, the values are based on an average from popular outlets or brands across a number of international regions, so that the information is as relevant as possible to you, wherever youre reading.

Fact boxes are dotted throughout each chapter and aim to provide some extra nuggets of relevant and interesting information. Read them, store them away to share with friends or simply skip over them, as you choose.