Sylvie’s Underhanded Wonderland

The new USDA food pyramid sure has gotten its share of ridicule since its release a month or two ago. But that guy who writes Mallard Fillmore can bite my a$5 - I can’t believe he spent a week ridiculing the damn thing. Let me start by saying I’m all for the new guide. Now, I never really paid attention to the old one, and to be honest, I haven’t sat down and figured out how the new one works, visually. Something about color coding for the different food groups and a 1980’s-Olympics-style man-symbol running up the side to represent the role of exercise in it all. What I am enthusiastic about is the online journal option that’s available to anyone at the website. Sign up for “My Pyramid Tracker” and you can keep an ongoing record of what you’ve eaten and how much you’ve exercised on a given day. You start by entering basic information about yourself, like height, weight, and age. Then, each day, you make entries for how much you’ve eaten of which kinds of foods.

You can choose to analyze your food intake for specific nutritional content, relative to the recommended allowances. I like this option because it’s just fun to estimate how much selenium or folate I’ve taken in for the day, and whether it’s enough to meet my RDA. Or, you can do the typical, boring thing and worry your confused head over how many calories you’ve taken in on a given day, and simultaneously win my eternal annoyance. Then, you can choose one of two formats for entering your physical activity for the day and see how you rate relative to a physical activity score index. One format simplifies things by inferring a certain amount of activity and inactivity for the day and only having you enter the strenuous, notable stuff. The other wants you to note absolutely everything you’ve done, all day long, and for how long you’ve done it.

Needless to say, keeping track of both the food and the activity is actually kind of hard. There are some days I can’t even remember what I ate for breakfast in the morning by the time I sit down to make my entry at night. A saving grace has been the fact that I eat almost exactly the same thing, every day, for breakfast. Yes, I am THAT boring. But what makes things harder is the fact that there’s something seriously funny going on with how you have to make the food entries. In order to have an exact nutritional analysis of each food item, the USDA obviously had to collect data on certain foods in certain portions. When you make an entry, you have to pick from amongst those pre-set foods. I have no idea how they collected their food items, but it looks like a combination of self-reporting by average Americans in a scientific study, and shameless collusion with brand-name food manufacturers. Throw in the occasional clerical error by whoever had to enter all that data and the fact that the search engine uses a Soundex filter to get you results close to what you’ve typed, and you get quite an interesting mess. For instance, there are three different options for “chocolate cake made with mayonnaise”, and not one for just plain chocolate cake. There’s “french bread, whole wheat, homemade”, but not store-bought white french bread. There’s the inscrutable, like “cold cut” (they don’t specify the kind of meat), “watergate salad” and “sushi, no vegetable, no fish” (…and hence, “no sushi”?). There’s little logic to it, but there are certainly a lot of options.

I can’t decide how I feel about the branded entries. You can be more sure you’re getting a definite nutritional analysis when you can pick a definite branded item out of the list. But it can be obnoxious to have to cobble together Trader Joe’s artichoke dip out of “artichoke, globe (french), cooked” - 3 leaves, “parmesan or romano cheese” - 1 Tbsp, and “cream cheese dip” - 1 Tbsp, because it’s sure not in the directory. Brand names like Powerbar and Gatorade are easy to find, but their competitors, like Powerade, are not included. There are Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig frozen entrees, but only certain ones. Typos sometimes trump the reliance on name branding, like when Campbells becomes CaNpbell’s. Everything’s in capitals, so it’s sometimes hard to determine a brand name, like the items “green goddess dressing” or “team cereal”, which to my mind could be cereal someone brought to team practice, cereal made from a team, or Team cereal, which I’ve never seen before. And sometimes, as is the case with plain Tropicana orange juice, you’ll find every single product by a certain company EXCEPT for the one you drank with breakfast. I just can’t tell whether some of the absences are due to the fact that no one in the study ate those particular brands, or whether certain companies paid to have their foods in the list.

I’ll venture into delicate cultural territory and say that there are some foods here I can’t really picture eating, like “cake, peanut butter, with icing”, “clam cake or patty, deviled”, or “beef salad” (mmm…beef salad). Some, like “yogurt, vanilla, lemon, coffee” sound gross as a single entry but if you take a second you can figure out what they mean. But that’s perhaps the wonderful thing about the data here; that it was obviously drawn from quite a wide range of diets. You can choose “moose”, you can choose “squirrel”, you can mark down your “manapua, filled w/bean paste, meatless”, “ray, baked or broiled” (hope that’s a fish they’re talking about), or “fish cake (kamaboko) tempura”. It’s just frustrating that with such ridiculously specific items as “beans, lima, imature, canned, low sodium”, you sometimes will still eat something for which they don’t have an analysis.

And whoever filled in “carmelized sugar” better watch their mispronouncing heinie ‘cause I’m coming after them. Even the Soundex doesn’t agree with you!

The physical activities entries are where the fun really begins. Think it’s hard to remember what you ate for breakfast? Try remembering EVERYTHING you did today, down to brushing your teeth and walking to the trash can. These are all obviously self-reported, with entries like “bookbinding”, “fishing in stream, in waders” (why do the waders matter?), and “retreat/family reunion activities, sitting, eating” sorted into categories like “self care”, “occupational” and “miscellaneous”. The “religious activities” category is a real hoot. Do “eating in church”, “standing, talking in church”, and “walk/stand combination, religious purposes, usher” really burn more calories than plain ‘ol secular walking, talking, and eating? Some of them make me wonder as to why the participants thought they needed to provide such specific information. They were in a government study, after all.

The activities database hasn’t escaped typos, either, so I can now dance “ballet or modeM, twist, jazz, tap, jitterbug” all in the same entry. Ah, yes, the modem. I dance it all the time. There’s no entry for sprinting or really fast running, but there is one for “running, on a track, team practice” which I guess I can’t use ‘cause I’m not on a team. But I do just love that if ever I’ve been “butchering animals”, “cooking Indian bread on an outside stove” (no, not challah in an indoor oven), or “canoeing, harvesting, knocking rice off stalks” (all at once), I’ll be able to analyze it.

Last, but not least, there is no USDA Physical Activity entry for sex. Because, as we all know:
healthy, good, USDA-approved Americans do not have sex.

Bummer. I know THAT would boost my fitness score. : )

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 9:30 pm and is filed under USDA Food Pyramid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.