American Beat: Pyramid Schemes

But the bigger issue for me is the amount of food the government wants me to eat. In the name of research, I recently tried to consume all the food recommended by the Food Guide Pyramid. By the end of the day, I felt like the guy from "Super Size Me."

To consume 11 servings from the bread and pasta group, I had to have two slices of toast for breakfast, a spaghetti sandwich for a mid-morning snack, a lunch that consisted of another sandwich, and then a dinner of Tuscan bread soup, rigatoni and bread pudding.

And I was still one bread portion short. I gobbled down a slice of bread before drifting off to sleep.

And that was just the bread. The few moments when I was not consuming processed grain products, were consumed by...consuming more stuff--fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, milk, nuts. I'd no sooner polish off a banana then have to guzzle a glass of milk. When I devoured a plate of celery, I still needed to eat that piece of skinless chicken breast. I felt like the fat guy in "Monty Python's Meaning of Life" (before consuming the "wahfer thin mint").

The good news is that the USDA is apparently going to address America's super-size problem, giving actual portion sizes on the new pyramid rather than merely saying "four servings per day." The bad news is that the department is still going to be the nation's meat-and-milk pusher--advocating far more of each than is necessary. The federal government is already being sued by nutrition advocates who claim that America's meat, egg and milk producers have too powerful a voice in drafting nutrition policy (no surprise; after all, America's oil, gas and coal industries have too powerful a voice in drafting energy policy, so it's nice to see that the same government that allows too much pollution to get into our lungs allows too much fatty food to get in our stomachs). And lest we forget, the guy who was president when the first food pyramid was drafted had a well-publicized aversion to broccoli and was far more partial to pork rinds.

"The Food Guide Pyramid should be independent of business," the Harvard School of Public Health said, in a statement posted on its website. Instead of waiting for this to happen, the HSPH has created its own. "The Healthy Eating Pyramid," recommends eating red meat "sparingly" and differentiates between white rice and whole grains. It also includes something weird called "daily exercise."