Problems with MyPlate

We love Michele Simon's considered response to the USDA's MyPlate nutrition guidelines. We apologize for being a bit sound-bite-y here, and we encourage you to go read the full article.

 

…Allow me to get a few things about the new version off my chest. First of all, the website url tells us a lot: "ChooseMyPlate.gov". The word choose or choice, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, it's a favorite of the food industry, to remind us that really, it's all up to individuals to choose to eat a healthy diet, and that companies provide a wide range of choices for us each to choose from….

As Marion Nestle pointed out, protein is not a food, it's a nutrient, so the meat industry must be very happy to see it represented so prominently, as they have brainwashed the American public for decades into equating "meat" with "protein." Most Americans eat way too much protein and certainly need no reminders….

They recommend "protein" but then why is "dairy" and not "calcium" recommended? Ah the politics of inconsistent messaging….

It's going to take way more than a measly $2 million educational campaign to get Americans to fill up half their plate with fruits and vegetables. It's going to take a massive overhaul of our agricultural policies…. It's also going to take addressing the billions of dollars in marketing the food industry spends each year to keep us from eating off of plates at all. (Perhaps a better image might have been a pizza box or a take-out carton?) It's especially going to take massive political will to stop the food industry's predatory marketing of junk food to children.

~ Michele Simon, Why we need MyPolicy instead of MyPlate

 

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who researches and writes about the food industry and food politics. She specializes in legal strategies to counter corporate tactics that harm the public's health. She wrote Appetite for Profit: How the food industry undermines our health and how to fight back, published by Nation Books in 2006.