THE FOOD GROUPS

ITEM: The Food Groups
SHAPE: Pyramid
AMOUNT OF BLOCKS: Five
ENTERTAINMENT TYPE: Picture / Drawing
CATEGORY: Nutrition
ORIGIN: Unknown

People are always talking about how the food groups are so great, "I love the food groups", "Don't forget to eat your veggies", blah, blah, BLAH! I don't think the food groups are so great at all!

There's three main arguments against the food groups that really discredit them.

First of all, I eat way more out of the top food group (salts and whatnot) and dairy, than I do out of the others (vegetables, fruit, and grain). The first two are supposed to be the unhealthy ones, and yet I'M DOING GREAT! I run around and play sports and eat whatever I want. I even had a physical no more than 24 hours ago, and I passed it. I may be a little near-sighted, but it has nothing to do with nutrition. That's from eating too many nuts.

Secondly, if it's so important to get ALL FIVE food groups, how come pizza isn't considered "healthy"? It contains tomatoes (fruit), cheese (dairy), crust (grain), grease (the top part), and usually vegetables. If it doesn't have "real" vegetables, it probably has meat, which actually falls under the vegetables category because meat is just reprocessed vegetables. (Vegetables are what animals eat in order to MAKE that meat, you fools.)

Finally, the only reason food is in groups is because we put them there. What I mean is, the only reason salt and oil doesn't grow in the same garden as peaches and cucumbers is because we don't plant them together. The way the food groups were probably devised was that some idiotic pre-Enlightenment scientists saw that potatoes and corn were always planted next to each other, just as goats and cows were kept in pens together; and so on. Then they made "scientific" categories based on these arbitrary associations. It never would've occurred to them that chicken, fat, and seeds might be closely related - as we now know they are, as chickens eat seeds, and contain fat. Why do we ignore this new evidence?

I believe that if it eating something makes you feel better in the short-term, it's good in the long term; even if it's McDonald's Chicken Nuggets. McDonald's food doesn't make me feel good at all; but that's because it's not healthy for me! Different things are healthy for different people. Therefore, I think the food groups should be recategorized to look like this:

I just took the regular foods from the food groups and mixed them together at random. Fats and rice are now on equal standing; so are sweets and carrot sticks; oils, bananas, eggs, and beef; apples and sourdough bread; and turkey's sort of in a corner by itself. This is how I believe people SHOULD "treat" nutrition!

If you want, build your own food pyramid. ("Paint" is a useful program for manipulating images.) I'd love to see what great ideas people have. Make sure it's shaped as a triangle, though, and you have to use pictures of food, too. And make sure there's no groups. I HATE groups.

This post was meant as a review of the original food groups, and so I'm afraid I have to give them a rating.

RATING: 1/10