Please consult your doctor or regular health physician before following suggestions found in any Sun Day health columns/stories.
The government pyramid looks at groups of food based on the amount of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and number of calories in a serving, which is often called an exchange. For years it has been called the Standard American Diet. As we said back in the first session, every diet has used some part of the pyramid to make its own program. The pyramid has been divided into five groups:
Grains (or starch/bread exchanges) that are mostly carbohydrates and make up the largest portion of the pyramid, with six to 12 servings recommended per day. A person can choose from breads, pastas, crackers, cereals, chips, popcorn, potatoes, and others.
Vegetables (two-and-a-half cups per day): Choose from fresh, frozen, or canned.
Fruit (two cups per day): Choose from fresh, frozen, or canned.
Milk/Dairy (three cups per day): Choose from fat-free or low fat and generally pasteurized, which is required by law.
Meat, fish, poultry, nuts and seeds (five to six ounces per day).
In the past several years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has converted the food guide from a pyramid to a plate to make it easier for children to make selections and called it choosemyplate.gov. It has four mostly equal parts and is divided into something that looks like a pie-graph with vegetables taking the largest wedge, then grains, then fruits and proteins at equal portions.
At the top of the plate is a circle for dairy, indicating a glass of milk. The plate has no fat options other than it’s dairy recommendation! For those who have read my entire series on fats, you know how important fat is to health. The public is left wondering about fat and has no guidance in making good selections.
Hospital dietitians use the pyramid to write reducing diets. Some practitioners of the dietetic profession are influenced by giant, processed-food companies that pay the Academy of Nutrition large sums of money to promote their products, which have little or no nutritional value.
We will discuss the problems with grains as well as sugars next time.
