Can we clean up our nutritional acts?
Go to the links below on this hot topic in nutritional science for Activity 8 (in Unit 8) and read about both the USDA My Plate, which has replaced the much-maligned USDA My Pyramid and an alternative Healthy Eating Plate proposed by Harvard researchers after reviewing all of the available evidence on links between our diet and our health (or disease)!

The HHS and USDA released the first official revised Dietary Guidelines in decades for Americans in 2005 and a new official pyramid.

My Pyramid (Links to an external site.)

The recommendations certainly looked more like health recommendations, although many physicians still thought it did not change enough due to agricultural industry influences on the USDA.

More recently the USDA released another complete revision, called My Plate… take a look and see if you think it is an improvement!

My Plate (Links to an external site.)

Nutrition researchers at Harvard, who base there recommendations strictly on the research data, not on lobbying influences, have countered with their own slightly modified version:

Harvard Healthy Eating Plate (Links to an external site.)

And here’s more about the Mediterranean Diet!

Mediterranean Diet Info (Links to an external site.)

I want you to consider all of these recommendations and then discuss here how closely you think you or your family’s diet follows the old or the new USDA recommendations and/or the suggested Harvard or the Mediterranean diet, and how you could/might make changes to more closely follow any of the recommendations you read about.

Last, would you be surprised to find that the food industry controls much of what comes out of the US government agencies such as the USDA and the FDA as dietary recommendations?

Why do you think about the Department of Agriculture, rather than the government health agencies, having so much say so in what is a health matter anyway?