Essentially, the experience made me neurotic and anxious about food (one of my great pleasures!) without making me especially healthy.

A quarter of Americans eat dinner out at least three nights a week, so for the USDA to systematically ignore this facet of the American eating system is risky.

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.

I'm not a healthy eater. But for the next week, I'm going to try my hardest to eat exactly in accordance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Dietary advice can be complicated. Good quality sources can have conflicting information, pitting one recommendation against another. And that holds t...

A study from the market research firm The NPD Group found that the average American only eats close to the DGA requirements a meager seven days per year. Seen another way, Americans eat according to federal guidelines only 2 percent of the time. But why?

Yet the question (and the problem) that haunted the food pyramid still remains: Is knowing how to fill our plates with fruits, vegetables, grains and protein enough to make us do it?

As soon as epidemiologists started following drinkers and abstainers, they found that drinkers had less heart disease and as a result lived longer.