This assignment requires you to take a look at your own nutrition intake and determine where you could improve.  

The Library has lots of reliable resources, including reference books and journals, to help you. Studies continually demonstrate a correlation between improved grades and library usage, so be sure to use the suggested research strategies provided on this page. 

Starting Out

Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) is a great database to begin your research. This database consists of reliable reference encyclopedias and handbooks, giving you an overview of the topic.

Suggested search strategy:

• Search the collection generally. Keyword suggestions:
  • fad diet
  • diet culture
  • diet environment
  • food environment

Finding Journal Articles and other Publications

Find reputable journal articles in ProQuest Central. This collection of resources includes several environmental collections such as Consumer Health Database.

Part of your assignment requires you to talk about which nutrients you should have more of in your diet and which ones you could do with less in your diet. Nutrients can be broken down into two main groups: 

Micronutrients: Vitamins and minerals

Macronutrients: Carbohydrates, protein, and fats

These terms can be used for searching in the library.

A great way to narrow your results is to combine search terms. For example:

• carbohydrates nutrition
• vitamin supplements
• food insecurity

Quick tip: Using quotation marks is another way of narrowing your search results. The quotation marks tell the database to look for the words closer together (as a phrase):

• "vitamins minerals"

Need more?

You can also try expanding your research by using the box on the Search page of this research guide. This box, powered by EBSCO Discovery Service, will expand the resources beyond just ProQuest Central and include everything EBSCO and our other databases has to offer.

Quick tip: To refine your search results even further, be sure to use the various limiters in all our database. These limiters include, but are not limited to, publication date range and source type.