MyPlate replaces the USDA food pyramid – and it’s just as confusing as ever

New plate special

Goodbye, food pyramid.

Hello child’s sectional plate.

If you haven’t seen the USDA’s new “MyPlate” yet, it looks just like a child’s plate divided into colorful sections because, you know, nobody likes their mac & cheese to touch their applesauce.

But now that we can finally keep our food where it belongs, we can focus on the more important issues…like trying to understand this insanity — because behind the simple image of a plate they have one crazy hot mess of conflicting guidelines.

Keeping it simple

To hear the mainstream gurus tell it, MyPlate is a huge success.

In article after article, government dieticians and nutrition “experts” praise MyPlate for being easy to understand. Not like that food pyramid, which is universally dismissed as baffling. One medical writer called it “confusing and divided into lots of intricate sections.”

For the record, it was divided into five sections. You were supposed to eat lots of the stuff at the bottom, and less of the stuff at the top.

Mystifying!

I’m ignoring — for now — that the actual advice was completely misguided. The shape itself didn’t take a rocket scientist — or a geometry teacher — to figure out what to eat.

I admit that the 2005 revamping of the food pyramid was a train wreck. It created a weird circus-tent-looking pyramid with some alien-like creature climbing steps going up the side. But even that was more ridiculous than confusing.

So to make sure there’s NO CONFUSION this time, they’ve come up with the four-section plate which is decorated in bright colors to help keep fleeting attention spans focused. And each section has a one-word label: “Fruits,” “Vegetables,” “Grains,” and “Proteins.”

It’s like they’re saying, “There! Simple enough for you?”

To the right of the plate is a circle labeled “Dairy.” Get it? You’re supposed to drink some milk. And to the left of the plate is a fork, which, apparently, is just a fork. I guess without the fork we might not know the big circle is a plate.

And there you go. That’s it. There’s just one thing missing: GUIDELINES!

MyPlate is nothing more than five geometric shapes listing each food group. If you want the actual guidelines you have to go to choosemyplate.gov. And that’s where things get…confusing.

For instance: Click on “Look up a food,” and you’ll end up on a new page called MyFood-a-pedia. Then you can enter a food word like “cookies,” and you’ll get a list of several types of cookies. Click on Peanut Butter Cookie and a box pops up to inform you that it’s part of the grain group AND part of the protein group.

That’s pretty simple. But then, we’re just getting started…

One medium peanut butter cookie is 76 calories. But it also contains 33 “extra” calories. And according to a box on the page that tells you recommended amounts of each food group for a 2,000-calorie-per-day-diet, you’re allowed 260 extra calories. So after eating your cookie, you just subtract one-half ounce from your daily grain serving and another half-ounce from your daily protein serving. So now you can eat 184 more extra calories, and you still need five ounces of protein, and 5.5 ounces of grains (although, if you like, you can keep grain intake as low as three ounces).

See? That’s not confusing AT ALL! (…if you still have a calculator with sine and cosine on it!)

Of course, what’s worse, you’ve just eaten a cookie as part of the government’s idea of a healthy diet.

As usual, if we follow USDA nutritional guidelines, MyPlate isn’t the only thing that will be round!

Sources:
“USDA to replace food pyramid with plate icon, source says” Jennifer Bixler, CNN, 5/29/11, cnn.com
“USDA to reshape how we see dietary nutrition” Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times, 6/1/11, latimes.com