Pick a new plate: how MyPlate fails

Choose MyPlate.gov for healthy commodities

At no time in history have we had more access to information, and yet as modern people today many of us don’t know anything more about how to feed ourselves than bringing it from plate to mouth. Every day, millions of people eat food that they don’t know how to make. They don’t know what the ingredients are, where those products come from, or how they’re manufactured. We have lost traditional knowledge of how to make food, but also, we’ve lost the larger knowledge of what our diets should look like. Food that used to be regional, seasonal, and prepared and eaten in particular ways, have been replaced with mass-produced products, even fresh produce, that doesn’t vary throughout the year, or from place to place. For guidance on eating these foods, instead of family and community, we have central authorities and credentialed experts. Foremost among these authoritative institutions is the United States Department of Agriculture.


To begin to understand why the USDA is a suspect place to get nutrition information, begin with the USDA mission statement. The USDA’s mission is to promote commodity crops: grains, meat, and dairy; and, to a far lesser extent, garden crops. A pie chart of subsidies from the USDA to the various food industries looks like this:

Subsidies to commodities

Compare the subsidies the USDA gives to the largest producers of these cash crops, with the USDA's official recommendations on diet to individuals. Then look at other sources of advice on diet that do not share the USDA’s ethical issue of being in the business of supporting business as well as being tasked with promoting the health of Americans. The bias becomes clear. MyPlate is skewed in favor of keeping legacy food groups that are commodities, like dairy and grains, on the plates of Americans, and creating new groups, like “Protein,” to encourage us to eat the new industrial food commodities, including refined soy and whey proteins.


Someone at the USDA is probably very proud for having thought up the “Protein” food group. It seems so inclusive, like a nondenominational blessing. It caters to several belief systems about food at once: industry-friendly nutritionism, the “plant-based” diet continuum from flexitarian omnivores to completely vegetarian vegans, and fat phobia. Unlike “meat,” “nuts,” or any other real food containing protein, “protein” itself is refined and treated as a commodity. MyPlate reflects the belief in a plant-based diet as health-promoting, while doing nothing to promote fresh produce. Highly processed foods like breakfast cereal, skim milk, and orange juice are included in its food groups.


Yet the USDA finds fault with fatty meat from a pastured animal, and with whole, raw milk: neither of these are part of an industrial diet, and their industrial counterparts are both correlated with disease. Because the USDA does not recognize the differences between industrial and natural foods, like the more balanced omega fatty acids profiles or other vitamins and enzymes present in pastured animal products, these healthy foods are not part of MyPlate, and their consumption is actively discouraged: the meat because it is fatty, and the milk because it is unpasteurized.

Dairy is still promoted, of course. A round plate should be a pie chart, but there’s an extra plate--or MyGlass--off to one side, full of "Dairy." And although the proportions are clearly intended as a guide, the shape of this pie chart makes it difficult to read. How much of each of these food groups is in a healthy diet? Should we “eat 120%”? Why isn’t MyGlass instead a salad, a cup of bone broth, a pickle plate, a glass of wine, or plain water? Can MyPlate even be modified into a proper model, or should it be scrapped in favor of a whole new shape?

While bone stocks and fermented beverages are also important traditional foods, they are not commodities, and their protein sparing and enzymatic benefits are simply not recognized as significant to the nutrition scientists or public health professionals who created MyPlate. Collard greens have almost exactly as much calcium as milk, cup for cup, but few people know it, because there’s no “Got Collards?” campaign educating the public, and there’s no “Dark, leafy green vegetables” group on MyPlate, either. This promotion of commodities is far reaching and very effective. Children learning about the food groups for the first time are introduced to milk, but not to collards. Which is enshrined in the school lunch program? Which deserves to be?


Milk isn’t even a necessary food. While Americans certainly drink lots of milk, traditionally, the people of the Americas didn’t drink cow’s milk. Throughout Asia and much of Africa, people don’t drink milk. Milk doesn’t need promoting as a food.


There should be more food groups on MyPlate dedicated to vegetables. Of all of the food groups on MyPlate, no group contains more diversity than this one quarter of the plate.


The “Vegetables” group, like the “Protein” group, lumps together foods with very different properties. Orange or green, starchy, fibrous, sweet, bitter, and sour, they all have different traits. Most traditional diets include some raw vegetables, and a fermented vegetable dish or two, like kimchee or sauerkraut. Raw and fermented foods provide many benefits worth promoting on MyPlate. Dark, leafy greens, and pod and flower vegetables, are important enough to merit their own, separate food group, and should be consumed often. Pretending that all vegetables are equivalent, from acorn squash to zucchini, raw kale salad to French fried potato, is just as gross an oversimplification as putting all “Protein” foods in one group.

Seven food groups promoted by the USDA in 1943

One of the original seven food groups was butter. Fats and oils, particularly the fats found in meat and dairy from animals raised on pasture and forage, are critical to human health. Once the pinnacle of the food pyramid, butter, lard, and other healthy fats are not anywhere to be found on MyPlate. The Weston A. Price alternative guidelines, based on foods included in all traditional diets, has just four food groups, one of which is Fats and Oils. Fat is a macronutrient, like protein, and just as essential to life. But MyPlate, with its disdain for traditional knowledge and exaltation of nutritionist dogma, fatphobia, and magical thinking about dietary fat, doesn’t include a “Fats” group at all.

The Food Pyramid of 1992

Then there’s everything else about food that nutritionism, and MyPlate, completely ignore, because it’s too hard to produce on an industrial scale, like the enzymes in raw foods. Nutritional guidelines from the USDA do not assign any value to a food for its environmental sustainability. They avoid any suggestion that fresh, organic, locally grown food in its season is preferable in any way to commercially prepared, conventionally grown alternatives. MyPlate does not suggest any of the synergies of traditional, complementary food pairings with its groupings. It doesn’t provide guidance on making meals suitable to different bodies, stages of life, or cultural norms. MyPlate doesn’t suggest a social setting, or the value of sharing a meal with family or friends. And even as MyPlate promotes a plant-based diet, it provides insufficient guidance to vegetarians and those with common food allergies to wheat, corn, soy, and dairy.


The most gaping flaw in the MyPlate model is that it does not provide enough guidance to be properly nourished. Since its only objective is to guide Americans in eating a healthy diet, it appears to be a failure. If, however, its real purpose is to uphold the USDA mission to promote commodity crops, it appears that MyPlate is a success.

What is ancestral health?

The vegetarian movement is gaining speed. Walking into the local Whole Foods Market this summer, I noticed a large banner hanging inside the entrance that recommended a “plant-based diet.” A New Yorker interview with co-CEO, John Mackey, suggests that the vegan at the head of the company would like to lead Whole Foods shoppers away from the meat counter. One of my food heroes, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who once killed a chicken on live television, has recently declared himself a mostly-vegetarian.

My own dietary practice is guided by a belief that people have always eaten meat. While I share a concern for animal welfare, I believe the ethical answer must include satisfaction of our animal needs. A fear of meat suits the industrial food complex, frankly: it’s cheaper for them, and has a higher profit margin, to sell you an overprocessed “burger” out of the freezer case than to make truly healthy meat—properly raised, humanely slaughtered, and untainted—available to everyone. The industry moves slowly, so while they’re turning their barge around, they have some cash crops to unload on the consuming public. I’m even cynical about the health news cycle. They all chant in chorus, from fad to fad: first fat was bad for us, then carbs, and now protein. Eventually, they’ll have to cycle back around again, or there will be nothing left to eat.

The plant-based approach has a challenger in the ancestral health movement. “Ancestral health” is an umbrella for practices that attempt to closely emulate the way people ate and moved a long time ago, with the aim of curing or preventing diseases of civilization. Although there are varying interpretations, the general assumption within the ancestral health movement is that for most of our history as a species, people ate a diet that met our nutritional needs quite well, and that diet has never come in a box or a can, had a nutrition facts label, been manufactured, or been entirely devoid of animal products. Where those in the ancestral health movement begin to disagree with one another is on the matter of how long it’s been since we ate the right diet for human health.

According to those who advocate the “Paleo diet,” our ideal diet is the one we evolved to eat, fifty thousand years ago. People who follow it vary in the strictness of their interpretation, generally deferring to Dr. Loren Cordain’s book (and blog), "The Paleo Diet," as the first and most orthodox guide. Internet discussion tends to concentrate on certain pet topics: what kind of exercise people regularly got in the Paleolithic, and whether some agricultural food or another is permissible on the diet, are common subjects. Paleo is popular with the CrossFit crowd. My other friends, the ones who shop at Walmart and BJ’s, and even the ones who shop at Whole Foods, have mainly never heard of the Paleo diet. I start by explaining the basics of the Paleo diet. You can eat meat, fruit, and vegetables (but no nightshades), and nuts. No dairy, grains, beans or lentils, on the assumption that before agriculture was invented, ten thousand years ago, no one ate dairy and wild grains were too small and sparse to be a significant food source.

After the Paleolithic era came the Neolithic, with its revolution of human innovation: farming was the first of these technologies, and its benefits gave us more leisure, food security, and hence, more people, to invent even more things, including ways to feed even more people.

Haven’t we managed to find any healthy ways to eat in the last ten thousand years? Dr. Weston A. Price was a dentist who traveled around the world, looking at people’s teeth. He found some commonalities among the many different indigenous people who still ate pre-industrial diets in the early twentieth century. They had terrific teeth, for starters. They also lacked certain malformations that we think of as perfectly normal today: narrow faces, overbites, crowded teeth, wisdom teeth that have no room in which to erupt. In some of these cultures people traditionally ate only dairy, or had very little meat, or ate a lot of seafood. All of the people in the cultures Dr. Price found ate animal products, some nearly exclusively. They all had cultured foods in their diets, and ate at least some of their foods raw (including raw animal products). Those who ate grains and legumes soaked, sprouted, and fermented these foods before eating them.

It would appear that, for at least some people who are gluten or lactose intolerant, some of the staples of agricultural diet are undigestible. Even greater numbers of people suffer ill health from eating sugar, factory-farmed meat and dairy, and refined flour. Both the Weston A. Price people and the Paleo people believe that industrial foods are bad for your health. They disagree on whether to accept the compromise we made ten thousand years ago.