EKiLIBRE

User Manual

Most of all, you think of mealtimes as moments of friendship and shared pleasure.

You also know that a healthy and balanced diet is a determining factor in your vitality, your well-being, and also... your weight.

To help you to find your balance, EXKi has teamed up with the experience and know-how of DIETEO (the nutrition communication specialist) and CIRIHA (the Belgian Centre for Information and Research on Food Intolerances and Nutritional Health).

Eighteen months of study have produced a clear and rigorous system of nutritional information. Now that system is available in this booklet: “Our Products: Analysis and Advice”. It contains an analysis sheet for each dish on the EXKi menu.

Our recipes at EXKi change from season to season. Please bear with us: the nutritional information about our new recipes becomes available a few weeks after they first appear, because it takes a little time to produce and print the new sheets.

For further details on balanced nutrition in general, please go to Part III, towards the end of this booklet.

the nutrition pyramid

Good nutritional practice rests on simple, common-sense ideas: balance, variety and moderation.

In order to help everybody find their way around these in practice, health professionals have designed a simple and handy ready-reckoner for helping to make good food choices: the Nutrition Pyramid.

Within this structure, foods are divided into families or “food groups”, each on one level. Foods in the same family share similar nutritional characteristics.

This gives a symbolic representation of everyday food that is optimal in quality and quantity. The pyramid shape illustrates the principle of proportionality: we need big quantities of the foods near the base of the pyramid, and less and less of the foods further towards the top of the pyramid.

Here for instance is a nutrition pyramid that gives examples of food quantities calculated in accordance with the daily requirements of an active adult woman (2100 to 2200 kcal)

The “extras”: cakes, sugar, chocolate, &c. for pleasure, in moderation Oils, fats and spreads (for their lipid content) sparingly, varying the sources (maximum 32g of oil a day) meat, poultry, fish and eggs (for proteins and iron) 120g to 150g a day Dairy products (for calcium and protein). For instance: 1 small carton of milk + 1 yogurt + 1 slice of cheese. Fruit (for fibre, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and water) at least two 150g pieces of fruit a day. Vegetables (for fibre, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, and also water) at least 1 portion of soup + 1 portion of cooked vegetables + 1 portion of raw vagatables a day. Cereals and starchy foods (for complex carbohydrates and fibre). At every meal. Preferably wholemeal. For example : 2 bread rolls + 4 plain potatoes (the size of an egg) + 3 slices of bread.

For more about the nutrition pyramid, please go to Chapter 2 of Part III, towards the end of this booklet: A Closer Look at the Nutrition Pyramid.

Four examples

To give a better idea of how useful these DIETEO analysis sheets can be, let’s look at the nutrition pyramids for four products.

The pyramid for the “Big Catania salad” shows it covers only 12% of calorie requirements. It contains plenty of vegetables (23% of daily requirements) and starchy foods (26%), and it provides a worthwhile contribution of good quality protein (16%) because of the chicken.

For the “Crostolo hot speciality”, EXKi has deliberately increased the vegetable content of the original recipe. This means that this lasagne provides 30% of the vegetables required and 13% of the calories; but it also contributes 19% of the day’s fats.

The pyramid for the “EXKi brownie” clearly shows how its contribution is an unbalanced one: a great deal of fat (63% of the day’s requirements!) and not much else. Keep this one for the occasional treat …

The “diet soup” (based on cabbage, carrot, peppers, &c.) is not a “balanced” product, either. But this imbalance in favour of vegetables in fact makes it an excellent complement – to a sandwich, for instance. Its calorific value (1% of the day’s requirements) is very low. This example shows that a single dish seldom makes a balanced meal, even if it contains plenty of vegetables.