What is a healthful diet for someone with HIV?

What is a healthful diet for someone with HIV?

There are two ways to think about nutrition and HIV. One is with controlled HIV, and what I mean by controlled is taking HIV medicine. That's when your viral levels are low if not undetectable. The other way to think about HIV and nutrition is if you have a high viral load, and you're not quite ready to take HIV medications. They're very different things. Where you have a high viral load, you tend to need more energy, because the virus is literally replicating in your body. So a long time ago, that used to be the mantra was to eat more and get lots of calories. That's not the case now with new medication. Now the mantra is stay lean and healthy and follow the principles of a healthy diet that you would ordinarily follow, especially to head off some of the side effects that are caused by some of the medications. A good healthy diet as described by the Health and Human Services food pyramid is a really great way to start. I mean, healthy eating is, after all, healthy eating. So having HIV or not doesn't give you a free pass to eat whatever you want.