New Food Guide Pyramid Offers Better Nutritional Guidance

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, the United States Department of Agriculture updated its decades old food guide pyramid back in 2005.

They did this to try and offer consumers a better guide to healthy eating by not only listing the food groups but also offering guidance about how much of each food group is required to form a healthy, balanced diet. They even took the step to color-code the food guide pyramid to help children have a better understanding of nutrition.













The new food guide pyramid expands on the original one of four food groups and now suggests there should be six. The color rainbow is 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.

As you can see, 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 a visual idea 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 you need of each group for different reasons. Whether you want to lose weight, maintain your weight or just eat the right foods for better health, the food guide pyramid offers advice on how to do this.

While including regular exercise, to maintain your weight you're advised to eat as many calories as you burn and to lose weight you'll have to burn more calories than you consume.

Eating for health will vary depending on the health issue you're 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.

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To Your Health,

Michael Toscano & Brue Baker
Owners / Founders
DietHealthandFitness.com

How To Consume Food With Proper Food Nutrition Value

In recent times, there have been many changes to the four basic food groups that we know of: Dairy, Fruits, Vegetables and Meat.

The reason why these groupings have blurred, and some might even say disappeared from the food nutrition scene is that the healthy food diets we can choose from today have many more options than in the past.

Nowadays, you can choose to include legumes, whole grains, fish, seeds, nuts as well as plant oils that all add up to making for better food nutrition. In addition, the many different ethnic, cultural and even religious preferences give us more options than any other time in history.

Create A Healthy Food Plan

To stay healthy, you have to keep in mind the proper food nutrition when you're creating a healthy plan for your meals. A good idea is to create a pyramid plan, which will show you which foods are your best choices.

Since there's a lot of variety in even these food pyramids, you might wonder which one is most suitable for you even though they're more or less based on the same principles.

Good food nutrition, as outlined by the various food pyramids, will mean eating plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. You'll want to cut back on the foods heavy in saturated fats, cholesterol and trans fats in the process. Other than that, to benefit from proper food nutrition you need to also limit or eliminate sweets and excess salt.

As far as alcohol goes, discretion is certainly your best option and you should really moderate the amount of alcohol you consume.

In addition, you need to be careful about the size of the portions of your meals. Keeping a close eye on the number of calories you consume will only benefit you in the long run. And of course, working in some time throughout the day to exercise wouldn't hurt.

Another good option to help you maintain proper food nutrition is to make use of vegetables, not as side dishes; rather, they can be used as main meals which means there are a number of vegetables to consider.

Some choices to consider would be Portobello mushroom burgers, spring greens with butternut squash, asparagus and tomato as well as red pepper French bread pizza, grilled vegetable kebobs, asparagus with almonds, Italian vegetables with pasta and honey-glazed sweet potatoes as ideal vegetable dishes that are sure to be rich in terms of food nutrition value.

To Your Health,

Michael Toscano & Brue Baker

Owners/Founders

DietHealthandFitness.com