They Knocked Down the Food Pyramid

They knocked down the food pyramid with a plate.

image from Wikimedia & the USDA

In case you haven't heard already, the USDA has come out with a new food intake recommendation guide. The one I was familiar with came out in 1992. You can see it on the right. It sort of suggested carbo-loading, while telling us about how many servings a day we should have of different food groups. Of course we had no idea really how much constituted a serving of most foods, but I guess that was our problem. Plus, the pyramid would get really hard to read if they put all that info on there too.

I think it was Michael Pollan who said something to the effect of humans being the only beings who need to be told what to eat. It's true. I've never seen a food pyramid for bears. Maybe they're very secretive about it.

image from Wikimedia Commons & the USDA

Apparently the USDA made renovations to the food pyramid in 2005. I don't know how I missed this, but I suspect if I did, a lot of other people missed it too. And how could we? All the food fell on the floor! And it got stairs (with a person climbing them who is ironically missing the most important part of your body to digest food)! The stairs and the person are all about adding physical activity to your daily life - which is admirable. Yellow is oils on there by the way. You may have noticed it does not have a label. And I read that the white at the top is discretionary calories, which I did not get from initially looking at it but maybe that's for the best.

image from Wikimedia & the USDA

And now it is a plate. The idea behind it being that being able to look at your own meal plate and see that the food is taking up those same proportions is more practical than knowing what the exact measurement of a portion is or even what 1 oz of broccoli looks like. Now the recommendations are 30% grains, 30% vegetables, 20% fruits, 20% protein. And then that smaller circle represents dairy.

The physical activity part fell off, but that's understandable since this guide is meant to be food-oriented. Apparently some people don't like that protein is its own category since you can get it from other categories. But I appreciate that the protein category is called protein instead of meat and beans. This can open the door to people accepting that protein does come from sources other than meat. And I like that fruits and vegetables are taking up half the plate. What's more, there's not even a junk food section! Of course people still have to stay open-minded to be adaptable. If you have a snack of grapes, you don't have to worry so much about filling the fruit part of your plate on the next meal. And of course your food doesn't have to be all sectioned out. You can easily mix those amounts into one dish.

This seems like a step in the right direction.

Choose My Plate has more information about this new guide along with tips about balancing calories, reducing certain foods, and increasing other foods.

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