The USDA Food Guide Pyramid: Operative or Obsolete?

Reader Contribution by Lindsey Siegele
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In kindergarten, I was taught that I should eat six to 11 servings of grains, two to four servings of fruits, three to five servings of vegetables, two to three servings of dairy and two to three servings of protein all within the span of 24 hours. It was 1992, and my classmates and I understood, largely because of a for-dummies graphic on a chalk board, that all of these foods must find their ways into our bellies or we would be weak, get sick and probably never turn into the professional NBA players we all knew we would one day become.

The graphic was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid, and it permeated all aspects of my young life. Every school cafeteria in which I ate for 12 years had a poster on its wall flaunting the Food Guide Pyramid. The milk I bought for 50 cents daily had the Food Guide Pyramid stamped on its carton. Even Saturday-morning cartoons, during which a cereal commercial would remind me of how important it was to honor my food groups, weren’t off limits.

As I grew up, I learned to resent the Food Guide Pyramid for constantly reminding me of how poorly I was treating my body. I practically never consumed six servings of carbohydrates in a single day, and it shocked me that anybody in the world could actually manage to eat five servings of vegetables between sun up and sun down.

Then, in 2005, something horrifying happened. The USDA retired the 1992 version of the Food Guide Pyramid and introduced a new graphic called MyPyramid that looked nothing, with the exception of its shape, like the original version. It felt as though somebody had stolen one of my oldest friends from me, tried to replace her with a colorful cardboard cutout and then had the audacity to call the thing an upgrade.

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