The USDA last week unveiled its replacement for the decades’ old food pyramid, and calls it MyPlate.
It has generally received rave reviews and positive press for more clearly showing the types of things we should be eating daily and their proportions. If you read the details, however, you would see that what looks like roughly equal portions of five food groups at a meal is not what they suggest you eat. And that was the value of the old food pyramid — it better depicted relative quantities of each of the food groups that should be consumed daily.
Digging deeper into the “plate”, you discover what the actual amount of each category of food the government suggests we consume.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Here, for example, the government suggests that most people should eat three cups of dairy per day. Depending on the particular dairy food, that could be a good amount or a crazy amount.
It turns out, however, when they tell us to eat three cups of dairy a day, they really don’t mean three cups. But that is the unfortunate term they chose.
*MOUSE PRINT:
A cup of milk is a cup’s worth, and the same goes for yogurt. But when they tell us to eat a cup of cheese, they really mean to only eat as little as an ounce and half. Except for cottage cheese. A cup of cottage cheese should be two cups.
And the ice cream industry really must have lobbied the government hard, because a cup of ice cream is really a cup and half.
Confusing, huh?