Today the USDA officially announced the replacement for their old food pyramid with a new MyPlate icon. This has been in the news a lot in the last couple weeks, with plenty of speculation about what the new “plate” would look like. The general consensus was that whatever it turned out to be, it couldn’t be any worse than the 2005 version of the pyramid:
Pop quiz: Huh?
The new version is definitely much better than the old. Despite some quibbling over the protein segment—since we can get plenty of protein from other areas of the plate—nutritionists are generally happy with the more obvious emphasis on fruits and vegetables.
The new MyPlate icon.
The idea behind the older versions of the pyramid and this new replacement plate has always been to give people an easy-to-follow guideline for how to eat healthy, nutritious, balanced meals. By that standard, the new plate is probably their best effort yet.
Of course an “easy-to-follow guideline” is no substitute for an actual education. The subject of nutrition can be complicated, and it only gets worse when people are faced with so much conflicting advice from “experts” pushing their various miracle diets. And then you have all those food manufacturers who are so good at creating and marketing foods that are far from healthy.
So the bottom line is this: Thanks for the new plate; it’s really pretty. But it’s just one small piece in a big, difficult puzzle, and while there’s a lot of science out there to help us, we are all still ultimately responsible for the choices we make.
With NutriMirror’s food journal tools, we’ve created a more powerful, more educational system to help lead you to the same goal as the new MyPlate icon. The tradeoff is that NutriMirror is also more complicated. It takes some effort and dedication to stay with it. But a healthy lifestyle takes effort and dedication no matter how you go about it.
If you saw my earlier posts about sugar consumption, you’ll remember that I used a random sampling of what we call Green Days and Red Days (days when NutriMirror members were completely nutritionally balanced in their choices, and days when they were not). I thought I’d take that same sample of days and see if I could put them into the format of the new logo. Here’s what I found:
NutriMirror Green Days vs. Red Days
The Green Day on the left represents an average day (from a total of 400 days) where a member ate foods that met all the USDA guidelines for vitamins and minerals without going over the maximum allowance of things such as sodium or cholesterol. The Red Days are made up of food choices that weren’t so healthy. I combined all the foods as best I could into the categories chosen by MyPlate. (The * represents those choices that either don’t belong or couldn’t be classified in any single one of the other categories (candy, soda, restaurant entrees, etc.).)
Right away we can see that the proportions are way off from the MyPlate graphic. It was pretty easy to figure out why, though. MyPlate is based on the actual visual appearance of a plate, while these pie charts are based on the total calories contributed by the different food groups. Calorie for calorie, there’s simply a lot more volume to fruits and vegetables than other foods; they take up a lot more room on a plate.
So while it’s not a valid comparison to put our pie chart next to MyPlate, it’s still nice to see the comparison between our Green and Red Days. It’s pretty clear that that the biggest contributor to unsound nutrition is that * category, which in the Red Day chart takes up more than half of all calories, and is made up mostly of prepackaged fast foods and restaurant items.
This new page that consolidates mealtimes with blood glucose levels is also printable, so you can take it with you when you visit your doctor.
