If you’ve come across any of my Food Guides, you might be wondering a few things. How does she come up with these lists of foods?
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Prior to becoming a Registered Dietitian and Board Certified Specialist in Renal Nutrition, I worked as a CPA (certified public accountant). My undergraduate degrees were in accounting and information systems. During those years of crunching numbers, I got REALLY good at sifting through large amounts of data (albeit very boring data).
Fast forward 15 years (and two Masters degrees) to now, and I use these skills to sift through large amounts of data about foods available for purchase. The vast majority of food manufacturers voluntarily submit their nutrition labels and ingredient lists to a publicly available database that is managed by the USDA. Anyone can download this database, but very few people can actually use the database once they have it downloaded (it is literally millions of records).
But I know how to use it! And the Food Guides that I have published on my website are the result of me sifting through MILLIONS of records in the USDA database to find the best foods for people with kidney disease. I sift through this mountain of data and figure out what foods are potentially a good fit. When I find foods that potentially meet my criteria, I then fact check the information by going to manufacturer’s websites to make sure that what they have printed on their label still meets the criteria (you wouldn’t believe how many errors there are in these databases!) and verifying that the product is still actually available (unfortunately, the database contains a lot of retired products as well). It is a very tedious process.
If everything checks out, I add the food to my website. None of these manufacturers are paying me to promote their products. So when you go through my food guides, you can trust that I have sifted through EVERYTHING. And I hope it saves you a lot of time from having to read label after label after label trying to find those needles in the haystack of foods that are actually good for you.
We don’t all have time to be making everything we eat from scratch. Processed foods are a fact of life in today’s busy, fast-paced lifestyle. I don’t have time to make my own bread from scratch or make almond milk from scratch (and neither do you, I’m sure!). Some processed food is absolute junk. Some of it isn’t. I’m here to help you make smarter choices.
Do I earn any money by promoting these products? Not nearly enough to make it worth my time. Wherever possible, I will include links to purchase a product (and also so you can read reviews about a product before buying). Some of these links will pay me a small commission – and I’m talking pennies! At the time of writing this post, I earned less than $10 last month from people purchasing something from one of those links. I don’t do this for the money (but I do other things for money like 1:1 counseling and build awesome courses). I include the links as a service to you to make it easier for you to get more information about a product (but I do appreciate my pennies when I get them), so don’t be afraid to click around and explore the different foods.
