Essentially, the experience made me neurotic and anxious about food (one of my great pleasures!) without making me especially healthy.
I tried incorporating two new normal life things into my MyPlate Experiment: restaurants and cooking for a group. They each presented minor challenges, but not as many as I might have suspected.
I'm only 24 hours into my mission to eat exactly according to the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and I can already tell it's going to be a hard week.
Food corporations enjoy carte blanche on what they can say about their foods, how and to whom they advertise, and even (to a large degree) the ingredients they choose to put in their foods.
By providing clear and accurate guidelines based on real food, Americans can see what a healthy diet really looks like, rather than what an industry influenced diet looks like.
In short, the new USDA Dietary Guidelines say to Americans: don't aim too high, you'll probably fail anyway.
The United States has had a long, see-saw moral and public health battle over alcohol.
Kathy Freston's new book, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World, details the tremendous physical and environmental benefits of a vegan diet in shocking but ultimately affirming terms.
The government's new dietary guidelines recommend that we fill half our plates with vegetables. I applaud the straightforward advice. But what about cooking your own food?
Overall, these Dietary Guidelines are more alike than different from their predecessors. In terms of the content changes, I like the new emphasis on obesity and chronic disease prevention/treatment.
The new guidelines devote two full pages to vegetarian and vegan nutrition, showing exactly how to pull a healthy diet together.
It is unlikely that as a country we will be shifting to a healthier eating style anytime soon unless the country goes into a sort of food-lockdown.
