New Food Guide Pyramid Offers Better Nutritional Guidance

For those who have not been paying attention, the United States Department of Agriculture in 2005 updated its decades old food guide pyramid to offer consumers a better guide to healthy eating.

The new food guide pyramid expands on the original one of four food groups and makes recommendations of balancing the amount of each group that is consumed every day. There is a color rainbow included on the food guide pyramid, with the size of the color stripes showing how much of a particular food group should be consumed in a given day. Not so much the quantity of each group, but the amount in relation to the entire balanced meal plan.

The colors of the food group include orange for grains, green for vegetables and red for fruits. Yellow, representing fats and oils, has been added to the new food guide pyramid and milk and dairy products are represented by blue with purple for meat, beans, nuts and fish.

Helping Kids Understand Need For Balance

The widths of the colors on the food guide pyramid are designed to offer visual advice on how much of each food group should be included in a balanced nutritional diet. For example, the color yellow is the thinnest stripe indicating fats and oils should represent the smallest amount of the daily diet. Purple is the next thinnest and shows that meat, beans and fish should be limited as well.

Additionally, the new food guide pyramid offers information about how much a person needs of each group for different reasons. Whether a person wants to lose weight, maintain their weight or eat the right foods for health, the food guide pyramid offers advice on how this is accomplished. While including regular exercise, to maintain a person’s weight they are advised to eat as many calories as they burn and to lose weight they have to burn more calories than they consume.

Eating for health will vary depending on the health issue they are striving to overcome, but the overall guidance offered by the food guide pyramid will benefit just about everyone seeking to eat healthier and more nutritionally balanced meals.