Scaling food pyramid makes one guinea pig a lesser man
Strange things can happen when you’re trapped inside the government’s new food pyramid. In the name of gastrointestinal science, I recently subjected myself to 10 days of obeying the USDA’s revamped eating and fitness guidelines.
I’m still recovering.
As a dietary guinea pig, I found myself drinking from measuring cups, debating whether Vicodin is a fruit or vegetable, and learning how to lose weight by changing lightbulbs.
Every day, I managed to mess up at least one rule. Nevertheless, the power of the pyramid delivered some intriguing benefits.
Healthy eating used to be much easier. In 1917, the Department of Agriculture issued its first dietary advice, urging Americans to feast on five food groups -- two of which were “fat” and “sugar.”
The 2005 guidelines are a logistical nightmare by comparison. For instance, the daily requirement of three cups of vegetables is supposed to be split somewhat equally among five subcategories: green, orange, starchy, legumes (which also qualify as meat) and “other.”
Fortunately, in Chapter 9 of the new food guide, I discovered the only sane way to cope with such complexities: “Moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages.”
On a recent Sunday, one day before starting the USDA program, I bought a $7 food scale and logged on to healthierus.gov/dietaryguidelines, which translates the food pyramid into English (sort of) and connects to a website that computes how many calories you need, based on age, weight, height and sloth level (2,570 a day in my case).
Sunday was also my Fat Tuesday. To gird myself for this pre-Lenten sacrifice, I visited an Original Pancake House for a breakfast of a baked apple pancake topped with vanilla-bean ice cream. Dinner was another nutritional train wreck -- an Italian hoagie from Philly’s Best, piled high with salami and cheese, with chips on the side. All told, I inhaled enough sugar, butter, salt and fat to clog the arteries of every man, woman, child and dog in Los Angeles.
Suitably fortified, I stumbled into my kitchen the next morning for D-day. The first order of business involved a tape measure and a banana. To compute the number of calories in the fruit, I had to know its dimensions and -- since guys aren’t known for accurately estimating such things -- there was only one way to be precise.
Next, using the food scale, I weighed a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats, then pulled out a calculator to translate the serving size information on the cereal box into serving size numbers for what went into my stomach.
For food without labels, such as the fresh-squeezed orange juice I drink each morning, I checked nutritiondata.com.
Breakfast was turning into a math quiz. (If an Egg McMuffin leaves Chicago traveling 60 mph, how many grams of fat does it contain?)
If I ever need to lose weight, this is a great method. You spend so much time computing calories, sodium, sugar and percentages of saturated fat that you don’t actually have time to eat anything.
It didn’t take long to run afoul of the guidelines. But I was shocked it happened at breakfast, which I considered my fail-safe meal. In addition to the cereal, banana and juice, my typical morning menu includes a toasted English muffin with lingonberry jam, a mug of chai latte, and dried cranberries sprinkled on the cereal. Healthy, right? Not quite.
The muffin, despite a label that said “Healthy Multi-Grain,” wasn’t made from whole grains, which are more nutritious than their processed cousins. And before I could sip any chai, I discovered the cereal, jam and cranberries busted my added-sugar quota for the entire day.
It was time to burn off the excess. For this part of the program, the government offers a bizarre choice of methods. The USDA operates a website (209.48.219.53) that gauges the number of calories incinerated by all sorts of activities, including accordion-playing, kneeling in church, caulking a log cabin, sex, flamenco dancing, changing a lightbulb and -- in the home activities section -- “butchering animals” and “cooking Indian bread on an outside stove.”
I opted for something less esoteric: jogging. Within a few minutes, I was gasping for air and aching. Despite playing softball every week, I was clearly out of shape since my days as a high school sprinter.
Still, the effort paid off. I felt great the rest of the day.
But a roadblock loomed. I was scheduled for minor surgery the next morning. This raised two questions: First, does Vicodin count as a vegetable or a fruit? Second, would I be able to maintain the USDA recommendation for 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day (more if you’re trying to lose weight)?
I laid low the day of the operation, but on Day 3 I visited a friend’s gym for a light half-hour workout on a combination of stationary bike, Stairmaster and weights. The next two nights, I just walked for 30 minutes.
Unexpectedly, when I tried running again on Day 5, my endurance was triple the level of Day 1. I don’t know if it was the diet (including a switch to whole-grain bread on Day 2) or the relatively mild exercise regimen, but something had kicked in.
It was like the reverse of the movie “Super Size Me.” Instead of trashing my health by eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month, I felt energized by five days of scaling the food pyramid.
Unfortunately, the effect on my sanity wasn’t as positive.
Even some of the scientists who created the program, which is based on reams of medical studies, concede the guidelines are impractical.
Example: The new pyramid recommends chugging 3 cups of milk a day. My normal intake was about half that, which meant making up the difference with 1 1/2 cups of low-fat yogurt (unsweetened, lest the Health Police nail me for violating the sugar limit) or 2 1/4 ounces of low-fat cheese. Go ahead, try to eat a 2 1/4 -ounce block of cheese every day. I opted for extra glasses of cow juice until I spoke with Dr. Carlos Camargo, a Harvard Medical School professor who helped devise the food pyramid.
He said the dairy rule was “one of the more controversial parts of the guidelines.” Some scientists argued that 3 cups of milk was too much (the old pyramid said 2 cups a day was fine).
The panel also battled over legumes. Should they be classified as vegetable or meat? A compromise was fashioned: Legumes are now officially bipolar.
One reason for all the confusion is the balancing act needed to establish sound dietary advice without undermining the various factions of the U.S. food industry. The scientists were lobbied by cattlemen, sugar producers, walnut growers, cracker makers, you name it.
The scariest part of the diet is the sheer volume of servings. I had no trouble downing 2 cups of fruit a day (an apple at lunch was all it took after the juice and banana at breakfast). But 3 cups of veggies is equal in size to three baseballs. And 8 ounces of grains means gobbling either eight slices of bread, 8 cups of dry cereal or 4 cups of cooked rice or pasta.
I expected to turn into a human dirigible. To my surprise, I actually lost a couple of pounds.
Camargo said the pyramid is better than Atkins and other fad diets because it focuses on overall health, not just weight loss: “It may not be as fast as the others; it may take you five years to lose the weight you want. But at the end of that time, you’ll have eaten healthy for five years.”
The USDA menu provides all the minerals and vitamins a person needs. Why not pop a Flintstone or Centrum tablet instead? Because vitamin pills usually leave out “hundreds of naturally occurring substances, including carotenoids, flavonoids, isoflavones and protease inhibitors that may protect against chronic health conditions,” according to the USDA.
Hey, I like protease inhibitors as much as the next guy, but I can’t see doing this for life. Aside from all the math hassles, the sugar quota seems unreasonably low.
But the pyramid did change me. I’ve permanently switched to whole-grain breads, I pay more attention to fat and sodium content when buying groceries, I’ve upped my vegetable intake and I’m sticking to the exercise program. Even people who ignore the guidelines will ultimately benefit, Camargo said. The food pyramid governs menus for schools, prisons and government-run hospitals, and that creates a ripple effect that makes the entire food supply healthier.
Sure enough, after a draft of the new guidelines was publicized last year, General Mills announced plans to add healthier ingredients to its cereals. I think we can all agree the world is a much better place with new whole-grain Count Chocula.
