Quick Guide to the New USDA Guidelines

We've been working closely with the USDA on a brand new product of ours that we'll be revealing soon (!). In doing so, we learned about the new version of the Food Guide Pyramid, called the Food Intake Patterns that was released a couple weeks ago. Here are a few changed we noticed compared to the last version of the guidelines, released in 2005. The new Food Patterns...

• use cups, ounces, and teaspoons to measure specific recommendations rather than "servings."
• increase the recommended number of cups of "starchy vegetables" and "other vegetables" per week, but kept the same recommended amounts for "dark leafy greens," "orange vegetables," and "legumes."
• provide "estimated daily caloric needs" for "sedentary" and "active" people only, instead of providing "sedentary," "moderately active," and "active" categories as they have in the past. [Maybe their research showed that many people who self-identified as "moderately active" were rounding themselves up from sedentary, so they eliminated the 'moderate' category?]  (click on image to enlarge)

View a summary of the new Food Patterns here or below (click on image to enlarge):