A food pyramid or diet pyramid is a triangular diagram representing the optimal number of servings to be eaten each day from each of the basic food groups. The first pyramid was published in Sweden in 1974. The 1992 pyramid introduced by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was called the "Food Guide Pyramid" or "Eating Right Pyramid". It was updated in 2005 to "MyPyramid", and then it was replaced by "MyPlate" in 2011.
The Reference Daily Intake (RDI) is the daily intake level of a nutrient that is considered to be sufficient to meet the requirements of 97–98% of healthy individuals in every demographic in the United States. While developed for the US population, it has been adopted by other countries, though not universally.
Ann Margaret Veneman was the Executive Director of UNICEF from 2005 to 2010. Her appointment was announced on January 18, 2005 by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Previously, Veneman was the United States Secretary of Agriculture, the first, and as of 2018 the only, woman to hold that position. Veneman served as USDA Secretary from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2005, leaving to become the fifth executive director of UNICEF. She served in this position from May 1, 2005. A lawyer, Veneman has practiced law in Washington, DC and California, including being a deputy public defender. She has also served in other high level positions in U.S. federal and state government, including being appointed California's Secretary of Food and Agriculture, serving from 1995 to 1999.
The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) is a system of nutrition recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies. It was introduced in 1997 in order to broaden the existing guidelines known as Recommended Dietary Allowances. The DRI values differ from those used in nutrition labeling on food and dietary supplement products in the U.S. and Canada, which uses Reference Daily Intakes (RDIs) and Daily Values (%DV) which were based on outdated RDAs from 1968 but were updated as of 2016.
The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF), co-founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon (Morell) and nutritionist Mary G. Enig, is a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to "restoring nutrient-dense foods to the American diet through education, research and activism."
A school meal or school lunch is a meal provided to students and sometimes teachers at a school, typically in the middle or beginning of the school day. Countries around world offer various kinds of school meal programs. Each week day, millions of children from all standards and grades receive meals at their respective schools. School meals provide high-energy food with high nutritional values either free or at economical rates.
Food policy is the area of public policy concerning how food is produced, processed, distributed, and purchased. Food policies are designed to influence the operation of the food and agriculture system. This often includes decision-making around production and processing techniques, marketing, availability, utilization and consumption of food, in the interest of meeting or furthering social objectives. Food policy can be promulgated on any level, from local to global, and by a government agency, business, or organization. Food policymakers engage in activities such as regulation of food-related industries, establishing eligibility standards for food assistance programs for the poor, ensuring safety of the food supply, food labeling, and even the qualifications of a product to be considered organic.
The Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services is a position created within the United States Department of Agriculture in 1993, and is responsible for administrating the department's fifteen nutrition and food security programs and for promoting the dietary guidelines.
Vegetarian Diet Pyramid is a nutrition guide that represents a traditional healthy vegetarian diet. Variations of this traditional healthy vegetarian diet exist throughout the world, particularly in parts of North America, Europe, South America, and most notably, Asia. Given these carefully defined parameters, the phrase "Traditional Vegetarian Diet" is used here to represent the healthy traditional ovo-lacto vegetarian diets of these regions and peoples. A pyramid was created by Oldways Preservation Trust in 1998 with scientific research from Cornell and Harvard University and specific reference to the healthy patterns of eating demonstrated by the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) provide nutritional advice for Americans who are more than 2 years old. The Guidelines are published every 5 years by the US Department of Agriculture, together with the US Department of Health and Human Services. The most recent edition is the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The nominal purpose of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is to help health professionals and policymakers to advise Americans about healthy choices for their diet. Although the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are purported to be based on a systematic review of the current body of nutrition science, the Advisory Committee tasked with formulating the plan for retrieval and analysis of the scientific evidence for the current edition of the DGA used a less than rigorous process for assessing the health effects of consumption of saturated fat and salt and for assessing the health effects of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. This less than rigorous review of the nutrition science literature resulted in omission of multiple large, high-quality, clinical trials and also omission of some high-quality prospective observational studies. Some Advisory Committee members also had conflicts-of-interest that in some cases were not fully disclosed. For these reasons, the quality of the Advisory Committee's Scientific Report and the validity of the 2015 - 2020 DGA itself has been challenged by critics as being unduly influenced by commercial interests and as being flawed due to confirmation bias of some members of the Advisory Committee.
Fruits & Veggies – More Matters is a national public health initiative from Produce for Better Health Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables. This campaign, begun in 2007, took the place of the 5 A Day program. The shift was implemented in order to better communicate updated dietary guidelines, which recommended more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables for some Americans.
The Natural Products Foundation (NPF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation formed to enhance and promote the integrity of natural products through quality, science and education. Its offices are in Washington, D.C.
David Mark Hegsted was an American nutritionist who studied the connections between food consumption and heart disease. His work included studies that showed that consumption of saturated fats led to increases in cholesterol, leading to the development of dietary guidelines intended to help Americans achieve better health through improved food choices.
Nutrition Education is a set of learning experiences designed to assist in healthy eating choices and other nutrition-related behavior. It includes any combination of educational strategies, accompanied by environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices and other food and nutrition-related behaviors conducive to health and well-being. Nutrition education is delivered through multiple venues and involves activities at the individual, community, and policy levels. Nutrition Education also critically looks at issues such as food security, food literacy, and food sustainability.
MyPlate is the current nutrition guide published by the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, a food circle depicting a place setting with a plate and glass divided into five food groups. It replaced the USDA's MyPyramid guide on June 2, 2011, ending 19 years of USDA food pyramid diagrams. MyPlate is displayed on food packaging and used in nutrition education in the United States. MyPlate is based on the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The history of USDA nutrition guides includes over 100 years of American nutrition advice. The guides have been updated over time, to adopt new scientific findings and new public health marketing techniques. The current guidelines are the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015 - 2020. Over time they have described from 4 to 11 food groups. Various guides have been criticized as not accurately representing scientific information about optimal nutrition, and as being overly influenced by the agricultural industries the USDA promotes.
The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) is a Washington D.C.-based trade association and lobbying group representing the dietary supplement and functional food industry. CRN's current president and CEO is Steve M. Mister.
