Problematic pyramid - Food Guide Pyramid - Column

Vegetarian Times, Jan, 1995 by Karin Horgan Sullivan

Remember when the Reagan administration tried to trim school lunch spending by classifying ketchup as a vegetable? It's hard to believe that following the resulting public outrage, anyone would make another similarly incomprehensible food-group categorization. But check out the September 1994 Journal of the American Dietetic Association, and you'll see it has happened again.

The issue features the article "How to Put the Food Guide Pyramid into Practice," authored by dietitians from the Penn State University nutrition department. The article's intention is to help nutrition practitioners show clients where the foods they typically eat fit into the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Guide Pyramid and its dietary guidelines. In an illustration called "Hard-to-Place Foods," the authors fill the Food Guide Pyramid with nutritionally bankrupt foods. At the base of the pyramid--in the bread, cereal, rice and pasta group, from which one is supposed to eat six to 11 daily servings--you'll find cake, cheese curls, fried corn chips and pie crust. Shocking? It gets worse: Potato chips are in the vegetable group.

Trying to make sense of this, I called Elaine McDonnell, M.S., R.D., one of the article's co-authors. She explained that the Hard-to-Place Foods pyramid isn't meant to be used alone but by practitioners as part of an educational packet illustrating how food groups contain choices, some better than others. When pressed on exactly what qualifies cake and corn chips as even bad choices from the the pyramid base, her answer was that the designations in the illustration had been approved by the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

So I talked to Anne Shaw, Ph.D., a nutritionist in the family economics and nutrition education department of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service. According to Shaw, corn chips are at the base because their nutritional profile is like that of corn tortillas but with "a lump" of fat. I did a nutritional breakdown on corn chips and tortillas. Sure, chips have as much calcium as a tortilla--if you eat 20 chips. And if you eat 20 of them, you'll also get 12 grams of fat. I'd call that several "lumps," compared to the single gram in a tortilla.

Our discussion continued, each of us never quite understanding the other's points. Every food Shaw mentioned--French fries, cake, banana chips (in the fruit group, of course)--seemed to belong at the tip of the pyramid with the fats, oils and sweets, to be eaten sparingly. But if you put all those foods at the top, Shaw finally said, there's nothing left. Nothing but whole foods, I responded. Yes, she answered, but that's not what most people eat; it's not fair to tell them that everything they eat goes at the top.

What's fair is not relevant here. If you want people to eat better, tell them the truth. If someone's diet is filled with junk, don't help him or her rationalize it by putting the junk in an acceptable category--even as a less ideal choice.

This Hard-to-Place Foods pyramid obfuscates the very ideas that the Food Guide Pyramid supposedly promotes. The pyramid was intended to be easy to grasp visually; if you see a food at the base, it should be part of your diet's foundation. There's just no comparison between corn tortillas and corn chips, or potatoes and potato chips. No matter how thorough the job done by the at least 65,000 dietitians who read the ADA's journal, if they use this pyramid, some client who knows little about nutrition will get mixed up and think cake can be as acceptable a choice as bread. It just isn't.

I'm not a food purist; if your life, like mine, is a little less complete without a piece of cake or some corn chips every once in a while, then go ahead and have them. But don't kid yourself about where that stuff fits into the pyramid.