Building on the Pyramid

Experts came out with a new food pyramid just a few years ago. Gosh, I thought the old one was just fine. I wasn’t paying any attention to the old one anyway, so what did I care about the new one?

Well, the new pyramid takes all the information we’ve learned in recent years about nutrition and puts it into a graphic we understand.

When I learned about the new pyramid in nutrition class, I was astonished. They’re asking me, essentially, to cut down on the red meat I have daily, and increase the numbers of fruit and vegetables. The new pyramid asks for 2 to 4 servings of fruit plus 3 to 5 servings of vegetables. A day.

You know, meat is my favorite food group. Well, next to the French fry, that wonderful little invention to which I became addicted as I was growing up. Don’t want your Gerber’s strained beans? Here, have a French fry. But then the concept of Trans Fat hit the airwaves, and I can’t look at French fries in exactly the same way. They’re just not good for you. But I love meat. Please don’t ask me to give up my ribeye.

Vegetables and fruits? Not so much love there. But the writing is on the wall, and in the face of weight gain, diabetes, high cholesterol, and cancer risk, I think I’d better think about some way of introducing more veggies and fruits into my diet.

Take a look at mypyramid, which is the USDA website dedicated to the food pyramid. The site will give you tips to help you incorporate more vegetable choices (such as “buy vegetables in season,” “buy vegetables that are easy to prepare…pick up pre-washed bags of salad greens or… baby carrots,” “select vegetables with more potassium such as … potatoes, white beans, tomato products”), set up a meal planner just for you, and give you a deeper appreciation for the pyramid and how it can help you.

I barely eat one veggie and one fruit a day. (I’ve started introducing fruit into my diet, albeit slowly, by eating fruit with my cereal in the morning.) My goal for the next several weeks will be to eat two vegetables and two fruit a day, minimum. That total of 4 is far short than the 5 to 9 servings a day the pyramid recommends, but one step at a time.

I’ll let you know how it goes.