Pyramid power: a modest proposal for better eating.

When the U.S Department of Agriculture released its long-awaited revised "food pyramid" in April, you could almost hear the sighs of relief from nutritionists in Mexico. The old pyramid had been under fire in the United States for its outdated diet advice, and was even accused of contributing to the obesity epidemic. The new pyramid--and the dietary guidelines it contains--gives much better suggestions for healthy eating, most agree.

But that's not what cheered Mexican nutritionists. What cheered them was its new shape. The whole idea of using a standing pyramid to give diet recommendations was to illustrate the importance of eating more of the foods toward the bottom, since that's where the longer horizontal lines are in a pyramid. The foods at the top were on the shortest lines, and they're what you need to go very easy on.

As a visual aid, though, the pyramid wasn't working in Mexico.

"We Mexicans have had our way of thinking about pyramids throughout history, and for us what's at the top is always the most important," says Tatiana Palazuelos, a nutritionist with ABC Hospital in Mexico City. "So when we'd show the food pyramid to people, they'd look at the top and assume they're supposed to eat a lot of fat and sugar."

MyPyramid

That's no longer an issue, because the new USDA food pyramid really isn't a pyramid at all. It's turned on its side, with the food recommendations running vertically. The width of each swath communicates what priority to give each food. Formally dubbed "My Pyramid," it's been criticized as too confusing stateside, but at least nobody's reading it upside down anymore on this side of the border.

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Do U.S.-generated dietary guidelines matter in Mexico? Yes and no, Palazuelos says. The Mexican government puts out its own food guide, known as the "Good Eating Plate." Much simpler than the U.S. version, it's the preferred visual aid. But the U.S. version tends to have an impact in nutritional circles on both sides of the border. And it can be a valuable tool for Americans and other English-speaking foreign residents concerned about healthy eating in an exotic culinary terrain.

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Weight Control

Besides its strange new shape, the new pyramid differs in a number of ways from the old true pyramids that have been fixtures on cereal boxes and schoolroom walls for so many years. Perhaps the biggest change is a new emphasis on controlling weight. This was never much of a concern of the food guidelines before--they told you what to eat more of and what to eat less of.

How much you ate overall was another matter.

With obesity becoming such a large concern, though, the issue could no longer be ignored. No specific portion sizes or calorie counts can be given, since they would differ radically from person to person. But at least Americans are being told (for the first time, officially) that they need to balance the calories they take in with the energy they burn.

Some general guidelines can be given. Moderately active men between the ages of 30 and 50 need about 2,500 calories a day, women 2,000. More specific estimates can be found at www.healthierUS.gov.

Exercise

Also for the first time, the U.S. guidelines tell us to exercise. There's even a little stick figure running up the pyramid to remind us.

Palazuelos is thrilled with the new emphasis on exercise, modest as it is.

"That's the biggest improvement in the new version and it really caught my attention," she says. "Anything that will help get more people to exercise is very important."

The single biggest shift in food policy is a near doubling of the amount of recommended fruits and vegetables to four cups a day, or about eight very modest servings. That's still well below the up-to-13 servings many nutritionists recommend, and it's not all that hard to fulfill. Anybody who can't find four measuring cups full of fruits or vegetables to eat each day in Mexican markets isn't trying very hard.

Vegetables and fruits do two things for you. They're nutrient-dense, meaning they pack a lot of vitamins and minerals (as well as digestion-aiding fiber) into very few calories. So every fruit or vegetable you eat can mean one less cracker or sweet later on. There's also a rapidly growing body of evidence indicating that a huge variety of the phytonutrients (beneficial plant chemicals) in fruits and vegetables protect against illness, especially heart disease.

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Bad Fats

Another important change with the new guidelines is a belated recognition that not all dietary fats are evil.

Now we know that saturated fats (mostly animal fats, like butter and the white marble in red meat) are the true culprits. They're converted to cholesterol once digested. "Trans-fats," artificially hardened plant oils such as those in margarine and most processed and packaged baked goods, are even worse.

But unsaturated fats, especially olive oil and the fat in almonds and walnuts, are actually good for your heart and interact well with vegetables to enhance absorption of their nutrients. (All fats, however, are very dense in calories and need to be consumed in controlled amounts.)

The other significant change has to do with grains.

"The pyramid is better now in the sense that it at least recognizes that whole grains are preferable to white flour," says Connie Gutterson, a nutritionist with the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, California.

Whole grains are rich in fiber and nutrients, but once refined into white flour (as in typical bread and commercial breakfast cereals) they're left essentially empty of nutritional value. Worse, these refined grains convert much more rapidly to blood sugar (glucose) once digested, causing insulin control problems and converting to body fat quicker.

Previous USDA food pyramids urged generous consumption of any kind of grains, refined or not. The new guidelines don't call for any drastic reduction of refined grains, but do suggest including whole grains in the mix.

That's a compromise that would probably be made by default in Mexico anyway, where true whole grain breads are very hard to find. But that's okay, according to Palazuelos.

"If you're eating a good balance of foods, your body can handle some white flour," she says. "The value of the U.S. pyramid is that it gives you that balance. If you follow it, you won't be eating too much of any bad thing."

And that, she says, will put you way ahead of most people on both sides of the border.

Kelly Arthur Garret ([e-mail]) is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.