My Pyramid

Someone on Jimmy Moore's forum posted a link to this article on QFever, a site that publishes medical humour & satire for healthcare professionals (yes, apparently they do have a sense of humour). I'm posting it here because a) it's funny and b) it got me thinking, a dangerous occurrence to be sure. Here it is:

TALLAHASSEE, FL--Robert Steinholz is a stickler for details, and he's making sure to follow the USDA's dietary guidelines to a "T".

Steinholz, an accountant and Florida native, consumes the recommended 6-11 servings of bread and pasta every single day, as well as 2-4 servings of fruits and 3-5 servings of vegetables. He also has a glass of milk and a piece of meat with every meal, including breakfast.

USDA Food Pyramid

In total, this amounts to approximately 120 apples a month, plus upwards of 300 slices of bread. "With some 20-25 slices of bread per loaf, that's, like, 14 or 15 loaves of bread a month," he explains.

"Yeah, it's hard to keep up sometimes," admits the 5'7", 280 pound Florida native. "But I figure, hey, if the USDA doesn't know what's good for me, who does?"

Steinholz, who began the USDA diet eight months ago, says that regular injections of insulin help his body process the enormous carbohydrate load that the "food pyramid" subjects him to.

"If that's what it takes to eat what the government thinks is a well-balanced diet, then that's what I gotta do, ain't it!," he says confidently.

His wife, Patty, is less than enthused about her husband's newfound adherence to the federal guidelines. "Look at this fridge," she says. "Between the apples, heads of lettuce, broccoli, and the freakin' loaves of bread, you tell me what there is to be happy about."

Not frickin' much!

I wondered -- what would it take for me to eat according to the food pyramid? So I signed up for USDA's My Pyramid Meal Planner to find out.

For me, a 5'2", 113lb, 33-year old female doing less than 30 minutes of exercise a day, My Pyramid recommended 1800 calories as my average daily target. My Pyramid then advised me that if I gained weight, I could simply cut back on added sugars, solid fats and booze. For now, I will ignore the fact that I gained weight eating less than 1800 calories a day (high carb, while exercising more than 30 minutes a day), and lost weight eating more (low carb, and exercising less), because I am feeling compassionate and don't want My Pyramid to get confused or upset. If you have a Pyramid too, you know how touchy they can be.

Next, the menu. My Pyramid, handy fella that he is, warned me to stay within these targets:

6oz grains
2.5 cups vegetables
1.5 cups fruit
3 cups milk (dairy)
5 oz meat/beans
5 tsp oils
195 'extra' calories from solid fats, added sugar and/or booze

So I searched for foods that would keep me within my targets. I tried to select foods that I used to eat all the time. After some fiddling (I kept going over on fat), I came up with this:

Brekkie
1c 1% milk
2 slices 100% whole wheat bread
2 tbsp peanut butter, reduced fat
1 medium banana

Lunch
6oz fat free, sugar free flavoured yogurt
3oz baked chicken breast, no skin
2c romaine lettuce
4 tbsp fat free Italian dressing (I'd need it, for that dry-ass chicken)

Dinner
1c 1% milk
1 tbsp Parmesan cheese (like, why even bother?)
2c whole wheat spaghetti
1.5 c meatless spaghetti sauce

Snacks
1 medium peach

This brought me in at 194 of my 195 allotted 'extra' calories, but only 1509 total calories, so to bring it up to 1800 I added:

1 tbsp olive oil (this maxed me out on fat)
1 tbsp vinegar (combined with the oil for dressing)
1 c romaine (salad at dinner)
1 medium tomato (split btwn my 2 salads)
1/2 c each chopped red pepper, raw broccoli and cooked eggplant (on my pasta or in salads)
1/4 c each mushrooms and cooked onion (in pasta sauce)
1/2 c unsweetened applesauce (snack)

This actually brought me to 5 3/4 cups of veggies and 2 cups of fruit, and 1802 calories for the day. Hope those 2 extra calories don't make me gain weight.

Then...My Pyramid informed me that my veggie choices weren't up to snuff. I have no orange veggies, no starchy veggies, and no dried beans. Sigh. Back to the drawing board. I got rid of the vinegar, 1c romaine, tomato, red pepper and eggplant and added:

1/4c baked winter squash
1/4 chickpeas
1/4 c baked french fries (I know, not bloody likely. What's that, like 3 fries? So say I was 'bad" and nibbled them from my fella's plate)

Now I'm 67 calories over. I removed the broccoli and the peach, and cut the applesauce to 1/4 cup. Now I'm low on fruit. I cut the applesauce completely, put the peach back and added three small strawberries. Dude, it is HARD to stay within targets on this thing. To be fair, I didn't have to include every type of veg (starchy, orange etc) every day -- My Pyramid advises choosing a variety from within each several times a week. But there was no way I was doing another meal plan, because this one took me 45 minutes and made me gain 6 lbs just from the reading of it.

Now to see how well I did. My Pyramid daily menu report tells me I've done "good" in each category, giving me happy green checkmarks across the board. I've stayed within my daily goals, and have remained under my limit of 20g saturated fat. I rock. I will never get fat or die.

But My Pyramid is holding out on me. There's no macronutrient breakdown. So, while My Pyramid isn't looking, I sneak off to confer with Fitday. Here's what I end up with:

Fat: 56g (28%)
Protein: 94g (21%)
Carbs: 250 g (53%)

That's a buttload of carbage. To continue to be fair, Fitday says this menu contains 37g fibre, so subtracting that from the carb count leaves me with 213g. Still a buttload.

Let's have some fun. Thanks to Migraineur, I know that 1tsp of sugar equals 4 grams. Since all carbs, regardless of their source, break down into glucose in the body, we can use this little fact to figure out how many teaspoons of sugar this menu contains -- and what my pancreas would have to deal with as far as insulin release goes.

213g carbs, divided by 4 = 53.25 teaspoons of sugar. If I ate like this for a week, that would give me 372.75 teaspoons of sugar. After a year, I'd have eaten the equivalent of 19,383 teaspoons of sugar...or over 200 pounds.

1 gram of carbohydrate raises blood sugar between 3-5 points, depending on your weight. How quickly or slowly they do this depends on other factors, but it goes up nonetheless (hence diabetics calculating carbs in their meal and how much insulin they'll need to take to cover the ensuing blood sugar spike). If I divide my total carb intake for the day equally across the three meals/snack, I could experience blood sugar spikes of between 213 and 355 points per meal. That seems insanely high to me, so if I am wrong, someone please let me know.

If that's correct, is it any wonder there's an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes? And since whatever glucose I don't burn off will be stored as fat (thanks to the insulin I am constantly secreting to cover these carbs, which shuttles it off for storage and keeps it there), is it any wonder so many of us are overweight, even though we're eating "right"? Is it any wonder so many of us have become sensitive to carbs? Have developed metabolic syndrome?

Never mind that this menu, as it is, would leave me hungry. I know this, because I used to eat like this and I was hungry. All. The. Time.

I was also overweight at 140 lbs. What would My Pyramid suggest in this situation? Reduce calories, mainly from added sugars, solid (read: saturated) fats and booze, and increase my exercise.

Now, as My Pyramid covers his eyes, let's look at reality. Here's an average daily macronutrient count for me now:

Fat: 152g
Protein: 124g
Carbs: 23g
Total calories: 1,953

And I'm 27 lbs lighter, rarely feel hungry, and have no cravings. And it doesn't take me 45 minutes to figure out what the hell to eat.

The moral of this story? Don't rely on the government, or anyone, to tell you what to eat in order to be healthy and/or slim. Rely on your body's response to what you're eating. And leave the pyramid to its intended role -- a tomb.

PS: For more fun, check out this parody USDA My Pyramid site. My favorite quote:

We cling to the profit-rich Milk category because the large percentage of Americans that are lactose-intolerant is not part of the profitable target demographic.