Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinagel. And today,

I have some sobering news to share about the likely quality of your diet and also some practical

ways to improve it if necessary, but first a quick listener Q&A. Christina writes,

it seems every time I go down the oil aisle in the grocery store, there's a new type of oil.

And I recently saw avocado oil. I know avocados are good, but what about this oil? Is it better

than olive oil? Avocado oil is actually quite similar to olive oil and it can be used the same way.

Both of them are rich in heart healthy, mono unsaturated fats. In addition, both avocados and avocado

oil are particularly rich in carotenoids. And among their many benefits, these nutrients help to

protect against macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of vision loss in older adults.

Now of course you can also get carotenoids from eating all kinds of red and orange vegetables

like carrots, winter squash and red peppers. And watermelon is another great source.

And adding avocado or avocado oil to a salad can also help boost your absorption of the carotenoids

in your salad veggies. However, avocado oil does tend to be quite a bit more expensive than

olive oil, so you may not want to replace good old olive oil as your everyday go-to.

And now let's get to today's main discussion. How healthy is your diet overall? If you had

to give it a grade, what grade would you assign it? A, C, maybe F? Well last year, Jessica Thompson,

Alicia Landry and Tamika Walls published an interesting study in the journal Nutrition.

They were trying to establish whether a person's dietary quality could be reliably assessed

simply by asking the individual to self-rate the healthfulness of their diets, the way I just ask you

to rate yours. As you can imagine, this could potentially be really useful for doctors who often

just don't have the time, or quite honestly the skill, to conduct a more detailed dietary assessment.

So a thousand adults were asked to rate their overall diets as excellent, very good, good,

...