Column: The Way I See It; Student struggles with My Pyramid
For three years we’ve heard how fat we Americans are. We’ve heard about diets and exercising. We’ve tuned into the news and seen video of the Fat Beach that only people who have no business wearing bikinis and Speedos can go to, just so the media can prove their point that we are a nation of lard buckets. Obesity is now considered a disease that afflicts rich and poor, minority and majority, young and old, paper and plastic.
So it’s no surprise that the people who brought you the Four Food Groups and the Food Guide Pyramid have now presented My Pyramid.
Where the old Food Pyramid had a base of grains and worked its way up to the fats and sugar block, My Pyramid features a flight of stairs behind a rainbow front of grains, vegetables, fruits, milk, meat and beans and tiny sliver of sugar. The idea is that people need to exercise and to personalize their diets as they need to.
Sadly, they are a little late for this idea to be revolutionary. People have been “personalizing” their diets for years. It’s the “See Something I Like and Eat It” Diet. The only thing new about this is that it’s a government program that gives people the ability to think and reason for themselves.
This could get ugly.
Think about it. When was the last time you wanted lunch and thought “Hmm, I had a serving of grain, fruit and milk for breakfast, so that leave me needing the meat and the vegetables and another grain. Let’s go with a serving of spaghetti with meat and tomato sauce. I’ve already had my sugar for the day, so no dessert?” Be honest, you didn’t. You thought, “I want pasta with extra cheese and, ooooh, they have Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream.”
The problem with the “We Are Fat” headline is that’s as far as it goes. There is only one solution to obesity and it’s hard to make “Eat Right and Exercise” engaging news for very long. You may hear something like tomatoes have a nutrient that reduces the risk of cancer, but that’s about it. Besides, we’ve always known that tomatoes are nutritious. This new food pyramid is just another clichéd attempt to make diet and exercise relevant.
Now that I have beat that horse dead, I have found myself with room for at least another 300 words (this topic isn’t even enough to fill up a whole column!). In order to fill space, I’m going to apply the subject of healthy lifestyles to college life.
It’s no secret that eating healthy is not cheap and after paying tuition, fees, rent and buying books, college students do not have that much money left over. It’s important to remember that the slogan of the starving college student is “It’s better to eat cheap junk than to go hungry.”
I’m willing to bet that there is macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, some brand of Rice-a-Roni, granola bars, Spam or some combination of these in the cupboards of every Utah State student in Logan. Why do we buy these things? Is it because of their inherent nutritional value?
Be serious. “Nutritional value” isn’t even in the vocabulary of the people who make Spam. College students buy these foods because we can afford them. For two dollars, you can get twenty packages of Ramen, about seven boxes of macaroni and cheese or four boxes of Rice-a-Roni (I’m not sure on the Spam because I’ve never been desperate enough to buy it, but I know those who have). If you save the leftovers, you are fed for the week, if not for two. On the flip side, a bag of apples costs two dollars. Who wants to eat apples for dinner for a week? It’s not about eating right. It’s purely about eating.
Now, I’m not advocating eating junk all the time. I’m trying to put these “solutions” into perspective. If the creators of My Pyramid really want something worthwhile to do, they can find a way to make healthy foods more affordable. I don’t know how that can happen, but I’m certain that if they took they time they spent creating this nonsense and channeled it into this worthwhile task, they would find a way to do it.
Chrissy Johnson is a junior majoring in English and would like to know what the stairs on the side of My Pyramid does for the people who take the elevator. Questions and comments can be sent to chrijohn@cc.usu.edu