In 1992, a seemingly simple yet highly publicized piece of nutritional geometry was unleashed on the American public. The United States Department of Agriculture, after much media attention, released the food guide pyramid, now widely knows as the food pyramid, and nothing has been the same since.
Well, sort of. The food pyramid—the partitioned triangle that we’re all accustomed to seeing on the side of a box of crackers—didn’t necessarily improve the American diet, but it did set guidelines for the approximate amount and types of items we’re supposed to eat, with questionable results. According to a report by the USDA, almost 80 percent of Americans recognize the pyramid, but only about 4 percent actually use it.
Yet the 1992 release of the pyramid, as well as the revamped pyramid in 2005, was fraught with controversy, intense lobbying, and criticism. Why is the seemingly bland topic of eating your veggies and drinking your milk so rife with contest? And why, with its puffed-up marketing budgets and shelf dominance, does the food industry care what the government says?
When Pork Rules Policy
Back before we lived in the land of plenty—in terms of both food and information—government played a critical role in dispensing useful nutritional advice. When vitamin and mineral deficiencies were common, the federal nutrition guidelines encouraged people to eat a variety of foods, and to increase the amount they ate. Recommendations helped Americans survive with limited funds during the Depression and make healthful meals during World War II rationing.
The USDA was put in charge of this advice and it has parsed and grouped our daily bread in many different ways over the decades. In the 1930s, the USDA recommended twelve basic food groups, then paired this down to seven in the 40s, and finally settled, for a while at least, on the four basic food groups we’re most accustomed to in the 1950s: protein (usually referred to as meat), dairy, fruits and vegetables, and grain products. The recommendations set minimums—four from the fruit and veggie category for instance—intended to ensure Americans were getting a balanced diet.
It wasn’t until the seventies, when heart disease and chronic disease became a concern, that the USDA started shifting its message from eat more to eat less. Sugar, fat, and alcohol became the fifth group, with recommendations for consumption in moderation. Saturated fat started to get a bad rap and animal products took the hit. That’s when industry—namely the dairy, beef, and egg industry—started to get involved in government advice. Worried their market share would decrease, intense lobbying ensued and reports were revised; instead of telling consumers to eat less meat, the USDA suggested eating two to three servings of meat a day.
Building the Pyramid
Since the eighties, the USDA has published nutritional guidelines updated every five years, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the idea of a symbol came into being. Experts on nutrition, scientists, and government officials convened to develop the pyramid. Basing their recommendations on the available science, the pyramid was supposed to be released in 1991, but it came under intense pressure from the meat and dairy industry, whose products were near the top, meaning they should be consumed in lesser amounts. The pyramid was withdrawn.
Why did these groups care so much about what a government issued symbol had to say? Although not necessarily the first thing consumers go to when shopping, the pyramid does have huge monetary repercussions; billions of dollars of federal food programs have to be compliant with it, so it mandates what’s served in school lunches, to low-income families, prisons, and so on.
One year and almost a million dollars later, in 1992, the pyramid was finally released. The then-Agriculture Secretary Edward Madigan was widely criticized for kowtowing to the cattleman’s lobby in its release and the final version was both praised and critiqued. Food groups were happy with the outcome, because it didn’t specifically tell consumers to cut back—instead it gave them bolded recommendations for how much to eat.
Yet that hasn’t really helped in improving the nutrition in America. Since it was released, overweight and obesity rates have steadily climbed across the country, as have diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
New Pyramid, Same Problems
It wasn’t until 2005 that the pyramid was revamped and this lag may have contributed to misinformation prevalent in the population (such as all fat is bad). According to an article on Harvard’s School of Public Health Web site, the pyramid’s “blueprint was based on shaky scientific evidence and it barely changed over the years to reflect major advances in our understanding of the connection between diet and health.” It also failed to reflect a changing cultural climate. In 1992, six to eleven servings of carbohydrates might have meant six different food items. But as portion sizes have grown, a bagel might now constitute four or five servings—almost a days worth of carbs. The pyramid has also helped shift the percentage of fat consumed in the American diet, which hasn’t necessarily been a good thing, since carbs—including low-fat cookies, fat-free ice cream, and fat-free cheese—have replaced it.
In 2005, the pyramid was updated and renamed, MyPyramid, again with ensuing industry lobbying and pressure to change the wording and recommendations. One of the main criticisms with the new pyramid, however, it not with its recommendations, it’s that its recommendations are simply hard to understand. The new pyramid is flipped on its side with no accompanying text—you have to have access to a computer to understand what the five colors represent. There’s a person running up the side of pyramid, who is meant to indicate exercise as a critical component of a healthy lifestyle, yet many nutritionists claim that this supports the erroneous idea that exercising lets you eat whatever you want, and is an overt symbol of the food industry influence. Some refer to the new emblem as the McPyramid.
One of the enduring criticisms of the pyramid and guidelines is that the USDA has a dual and conflicting roll—giving recommendations on what American should eat while simultaneously promoting agricultural products. In this way, rarely are we told to eat less of any one thing. The only slight admonishment in the new pyramid is to “go easy on fruit juices.”
In addition, food groups seize on the recommendations, often with distorted outcomes. The new pyramid recommends that half our carbs come from whole grain sources, which lead to a proliferation of questionable “healthy” whole grain products—100 percent whole grain Chips Ahoy, “whole grain white” bread, and brown sugar cinnamon whole grain Pop Tarts.
Relevance?
Despite its shortcomings, the pyramid offers mainly sound advice, as it almost always has: eat lots of fruits and vegetables, go for lean protein sources, eat a wide variety of foods, keep sugar to a minimum. But the main problem isn’t its content; the main problem is its context. The pyramid was built in a world where children are bombarded with fast food and junk food advertising the minute they’re able to focus on a screen, where unhealthy, cheap food is more abundant than healthful food, where subsidies for unhealthful food continue, where inactivity is the norm, not the exception, and where corporate influence plays a huge part in coming up with agriculture and nutrition policy.
The pyramid helps consumers wade through the jargon of the simple question of what to eat. But without the government making changes to actually address the type of food that’s out there, the pyramid will remain a relic of a long ago lost time.