Food Mountain

Have you ever read the suggested servings printed on the food pyramid and actually imagined what they would entail? Specifically, since it never offers advice on how to balance the numbers, I'm assuming a "healthy" diet can include the higher end of the ranges given.

My favorite, which I see most frequently, is that for fruits and vegetables: 5-9 servings per day. 9 servings?! If I ate 9 servings of fruit a day, that's all I would eat. That's 3 servings per meal, and coming up with such an impressive array of produce, three times a day, strikes me as more of a challenge than it does a reasonable diet.

Then we have bread and starch: 6-11 servings. Now, maybe I missed something, but 11 servings per day is almost 4 servings per meal, and unless my sole intent were to spite Dr. Atkins himself, I don't think this sounds like a healthy program. There's a reason diets tend to be low-carb.

And lets not forget meat! 2-3 servings a day... now that's an American meal plan! Bacon for breakfast, chicken for lunch, and steak for dinner. Fry 'em up, Dan!

The only sector of the pyramid that seems reasonable is dairy, at 2-3 servings per day. Granted, I'm a fan of cereal for breakfast and a glass of milk with dinner, but at least you won't gain too much weight by drinking 2%.

So all in all, it seems to me that the goal of the food pyramid is obesity through unreasonably high intake of food. Now, I'm not sure what it is they had in mind, but I sure would like to think there's a better explanation than this.

I'm Not A Musician, But I Pretend

You may recognize this from the post "Anyone But You." Click to stream if you've got a good connection, otherwise right-click > save target as.

Anyone But You (Mixdown)