By Katy Mitchell-Gilroy, 

Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released an updated food guide called MyPlate.

MyPlate replaces MyPyramid (introduced in 2005) as the USDA’s visual guide to healthy eating. MyPyramid and it’s earlier incarnation, The Food Guide Pyramid, were perceived

The USDA's MyPlate

From the American Diabetes Association

The New American Plate from the American Institute of Cancer Research

as a useful teaching tool, but too complicated for the average person to use as a guide for healthy eating on a daily basis. The new MyPlate guide provides a familiar image — a plate — along with easy-to-understand messages designed to be clear and helpful to the average person as they try to make healthy decisions about their diet.

Why a plate in particular? A plate is something that most people will relate with. Presuming that pretty much anyone glancing at this image will be able to relate the image they see to their daily experience serving and eating meals, the viewer will also get a quick idea of how their own plates should look.

One major change that was made in the shift from MyPyramid to MyPlate is that the “fat” group, which includes added fats such as oils, butter and margarine, has been eliminated. While fat is an important part of the diet, most Americans get enough of these without trying, and their exclusion on MyPlate may help encourage people to reduce the fat in their diet. In fact, the new Dietary Guidelines specifically highlights the need to decrease intake of solid fat, which is any fat that is solid at room temperature (butter, margarine, lard).

MyPlate goes hand in hand with the nutrition advice offered as part of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are developed every five years by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services and represent some of the strongest research- and evidenced-based nutrition information available. Their newest recommendations for all Americans aged 2 and older are:

Balancing Calories

• Enjoy your food, but eat less.
• Avoid oversized portions.

Foods to Increase

• Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.
• Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.

Foods to Reduce

• Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread and frozen meals — and choose the foods with lower numbers.
• Drink water instead of sugary drinks.

MyPlate’s visual representation embodies all of these principles without the guesswork of the confusing MyPyramid graphic. And better yet, MyPlate doesn’t just stop with the visual. With its interactive website, you can rate your plate, log your physical activity or look up thousands of food items in the USDA nutrient database. You can even get nutrition tweets!

The Food Bank for one is excited about this new guide and is planning changes based on MyPlate to our CookShop nutrition-education lesson plans, and I am busy preparing new nutrition lessons for our food assistance network. Stay tuned for more on how the Food Bank is working with MyPlate to help make a healthier New York!

Several other well-respected health organizations currently use plates to model a healthful diet. Check out a couple examples to your right, and click here for a slideshow of other plates. Let us know what you think of these plates in the comments!