BigOven

I would really be able to use BigOven a lot more in my houshold if it supported DASH Diet menu planning.  In this lifestyle/diet I often need to add a large number of individual plain whole foods to my menues.  I realize that your purpose is to make shopping list for the recipes but it would be EXTREMELY helpful if I could also add individual items like, "8 grape tomatoes" or "1 small peach" to my menu.  When I am planning so very many produce items in my menues, the fact that I can only schedule recipes per-se makes the menu feature all but useless to me.  As a busy mother of 9, I don't have time to plan my menues on Big Oven just to have to revamp the entire thing in order to add my individual items and portions.

 Items that I would need to enter individually in my menu would include: produce items, dairy items (milk, yogurt, and some cheeses), whole grains (like hot cereals) etc.  I also use measured quantities of things like dry cereals and such.

 Thanks.  We can't promise anything here but it's been a request in the past.  What resources can you point me to so that we can get a little more up to speed on DASH and what that might mean?

Steve,

I think the first part of this is food group servings/exchanges, and then the ability to fill them in just like we fill in nutritional information.

The DASH diet is introduced at the NHLBI website.

Many links I've found helpful are collected under the heading "Basics" at http://familynutritionist.blogspot.com/

and in the post http://familynutritionist.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-many-servings-in-cup-of-flour.html

The original book is http://www.akabook.com/isbn13.jsp?isbn=9780743202954. It has some errors in the "servings per day" table.

The DASH servings are closely related to the USDA "mypyramid" servings -- often, one can be calculated from the other.