Blog

Healthy Eating: Small Changes Matter

July 22, 2025

By Anna Kreiser, MS, RDN, LDN

Just the word “diet” can be a loaded word that brings up a wide variety of thoughts and feelings. Some people may remember times they or a loved one tried a diet and felt they either had great success or failure.

Coming back to its roots, the word diet can be used as:

  • A noun describing food and drink regularly provided or consumed
  • A verb meaning to feed or to cause to take food
  • An adjective meaning reduced in or free from calories

To put it simply, a diet is a pattern of eating. Everybody has a usual diet. Time has given us many fad diets that have come and gone. Some have gone out of fashion over time as beauty standards have shifted and changed. Others have changed as we have learned more about the connection between nutrition and different diseases.

So, what is it that makes a diet healthy or unhealthy? The problem with most fad diets is they are not sustainable. You are either on the diet or off the diet. As a registered dietitian, I try to nudge people away from radical changes that cannot be sustained and often don’t promote good overall health. I nudge them toward sustainable changes that promote health or to prevent or manage chronic diseases without putting blinders on — focusing on one aspect of health while ignoring others. So, let’s talk about some current diets that you may (or may not) have heard about!

Mediterranean Diet

This diet was inspired by the eating patterns of the Mediterranean region. It emphasizes the importance of whole, plant-based foods including fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. It also encourages more fish and olive oil. It recommends limiting red meat. Some people I’ve worked with are hesitant to embrace this diet because they don’t like seafood or think they will be limited to only traditional Mediterranean dishes. However, the principles of this diet can still be applied even if you don’t like fish or want to mix in different kinds of cuisines.

DASH

DASH is an acronym for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.” Just like the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet focuses on overarching nutrition recommendations to promote good health instead of focusing on specific foods or lots of rigid rules. The DASH diet also promotes incorporating more fruits, veggies, whole grains, and plant-based fats. The DASH diet also encourages limiting higher-fat meats and saturated fats (i.e., fats that are solid at room temperature like butter and lard). The DASH diet also has a special emphasis on limiting sodium (salt) in the diet as salt is the No. 1 nutrient linked with hypertension (or high blood pressure).

MIND

MIND stands for “Mediterranean-DASH Intervention of Neurodegenerative Delay.” This is a diet that combines the principles of the Mediterranean and the DASH diets specifically for promoting brain health. As you may have already guessed, the MIND diet promotes lots of fruits (especially berries), vegetables (especially green, leafy vegetables), nuts, whole grains, fish, lean meats, and beans. And just like the other diets, it suggests limiting red meat and desserts.

MyPlate

Some readers here may be old enough to remember the food pyramid of decades past. The pyramid went through some updates and until it was replaced with MyPlate in 2011. The MyPlate eating guidelines focus on choosing whole foods and a balanced plate. Each food group has a slogan to promote choosing quality options.

  • Grains: Make half your grains whole grains.
  • Protein: Vary your protein routine.
  • Fruits and Vegetables: Focus on whole fruits. Vary your veggies. Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.
  • Dairy: Move to low-fat or fat-free dairy milk or yogurt (or lactose-free dairy or fortified soy versions).
  • MyPlate: The benefits of healthy eating add up over time, bite by bite. Small changes matter. Start Simple with MyPlate.

While there are slight differences between each of these diets, or nutritional guidelines, each of them has the same nuts and bolts. These nutrition basics focus on promoting balanced eating, whole foods, and more plant-based foods. All these diets are shown to promote the best health and well-being across the board. Each of these diets focus on well-balanced food choices from a variety of food groups and on choosing quality options within each food group.

Other trendy diets often tend to focus on praising one food group category and villainizing others. The current trends tend to praise proteins and fats while villainizing carbohydrates. In past decades, fats were the feared and dreaded food. Fad diets also tend to promise quick or dramatic results. Painting nutrition in black and white terms of good foods/bad foods does not allow for the nuance of what our bodies need. For example, our bodies need carbohydrates — they’re the body’s main energy source. Labeling all carbs as bad often means missing out on fiber, important B vitamins and other key nutrients.

You should also consider the quality of the food choice. Whole grains, fruits, beans, and other whole plant foods are high in carbohydrates but also high in fiber and have lots of great nutrients. Desserts, chips, crackers, and many snack foods are high in carbohydrate but are also often high in calories, saturated fats, and sodium while being low in fiber and other nutrients.

It’s not a matter of one being bad and the other being good. The questions I come back to when thinking about what foods fit in an overall balanced diet are:

  1. How much?
  2. How Often?
  3. What else are you having with it?

MyPlate teaches us “the benefits of healthy eating add up over time, bite by bite. Small changes matter. Start Simple with MyPlate.” And as my favorite professor loved to say, “Small changes make big differences.”

Registered dietitian nutritionists — more usually just called a dietitian — can help individuals navigate the confusing sea of conflicting nutritional advice and help that person find a plan that makes sense for their unique needs. To consider a person’s health conditions, financial resources, cooking ability, personal preferences, and individual goals is important to finding a diet that works for them and to finding ways to make healthy changes feel sustainable and healthy behaviors part of everyday life.