By eating a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables — green, yellow-orange, red, blue-purple, and white — you're giving your body a wide range of nutrients that are important for good health. Each color offers different combinations of vitamins, minerals, and disease-fighting phytochemicals, that work together to protect your health. Only fruits and vegetables, not pills or supplements, can give you these nutrients in the healthy combinations nature intended.

From 1941 to 1989, the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) released the Recommended Dietary Allowances or RDA's. The RDA's are a single set of nutrient specific values. During deliberations in the mid- 1990's the FNB decided to replace this single set of values with multiple sets of values, including : Estimated Average Requirements (EAR), Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), Adequate Intakes (AI), and Tolerable Upper Intake Levels, (UL) for designated age groups, physiologic states, and by sex. These values are collectively referred to as the Dietary Reference Intakes, or DRI's.

Some mesothelioma patients may find meal planning is more burdensome if shopping or preparing meals is difficult.

It may be necessary for meals to be simple, quick, and convenient to prepare. Ready-to-eat, whole grain breakfast cereals are a nutritious meal or snack anytime, as are quick-cooking hot cereals like oatmeal, which can be cooked in a microwave oven. Fresh fruit is also convenient, but canned fruits, packed in their own juice or water, will keep for months in the cupboard and can also make a simple snack. Whole grain breads, bagels, and lowfat muffins can be kept in the freezer and individual servings taken out as needed. Other good freezer and cupboard staples include bags of mixed, plain frozen vegetables, whole grain crackers, peanut butter, canned beans such as pinto beans or black-eyed peas, and jars of vegetable salads such as three-bean or beet salad.

It also makes sense, for those who are able to do more extensive cooking, to fix enough of a recipe so that some can be frozen in small batches to be reheated at a later date. For example, bean chili, vegetable lasagna, some casseroles, whole grain cookies, lowfat muffins, or pancakes all freeze well and can be stored in small containers that can be reheated in a conventional or microwave oven.