Food Guide Pyramid

The Food Guide Pyramid is one way for people to understand how to eat healthy. A rainbow of colored, vertical stripes represents the five food groups plus fats and oils. Here's what the colors stand for:

• orange - grains
• green - vegetables
• red - fruits
• yellow - fats and oils
• blue - milk and dairy products
• purple - meat, beans, fish, and nuts

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) changed the pyramid in spring 2005 because they wanted to do a better job of telling Americans how to be healthy. The person climbing the staircase up the side of the pyramid is a way of showing us how important it is to exercise and be active every day.

The new Food Guide Pyramid is also telling us to:
Eat a variety of foods. A balanced diet is one that includes all the food groups. In other words, have foods from every color, every day.
Eat less of some foods, and more of others. You can see that the bands for meat and protein (purple) and oils (yellow) are skinnier than the others. That's because you need less of those kinds of foods than you do of fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy foods.
You also can see the bands start out wider and get thinner as they approach the top. That's designed to show you that not all foods are created equal, even within a healthy food group like fruit. For instance, apple pie might be in that thin part of the fruit band because it has a lot of added sugar and fat. A whole apple would be down in the wide part because you can eat more of those within a healthy diet.
Make it personal. Through the USDA's MyPyramid website, you can get personalized recommendations about the mix of foods you need to eat and how much you should be eating.

For more information, visit this link (http://www.mypyramid.gov/index.html).