Meet the new food pyramid adherents!

There are six Americans changing their diets to align with the new food pyramid, according to USDA Associate Commissioner for Surveys and Futility, Anna Clark.

“While it can be difficult to track trends in who chooses to adhere to governmental dietary guidance, a pattern emerged relatively quickly,” the Associate Commissioner reported. “All six are in Mr. Moore’s freshman health class at Central Fairview High School.”

When asked why she was choosing to follow the new food pyramid, McKayla Walker, one of the new adherents, shrugged and said, “Mr. Moore is a really tough grader, and I can’t risk a bad grade on this assignment. It’s only for a week.”

“At first, we thought we were going to follow MyPlate for the ‘Balanced Diet’ end of semester assignment, but then right after break they released a different food pyramid,” reported Trey Phillips, another student who reports that he will change his diet. “Mr. Moore just screenshotted it and copy-pasted it into the assignment document. You can see what other tabs he had open, and the bottom half of MyPlate is still there--I guess he’s been pretty busy with coaching lately.”

“It’s pretty hard to see what is even on the new food pyramid, when it’s printed in black and white on a copier that needs repair,” Walker added. “Look, the picture’s all grainy, and there’s a white streak through every other line of text.”

But not to be deterred by poorly printed assignments, the high schoolers did their own research.

“I’m still a bit confused. My family has been cooking with olive and avocado oil for ages, and we eat tons of eggs, meat, and dairy. So why is it being presented as ending a war on healthy fats?” Phillips pondered. “Avoid processed foods--I can do that. My mom keeps telling me to cut out all the Twix bars anyway. I might as well.”

“The big thing I have to do here is replace flour tortillas with corn tortillas on Taco Tuesday, and the two percent milk with full-fat milk. I’m really not sure how that will make a difference, but maybe my brother can drive me to the grocery store so I can pick those up,” Walker considered, reaching for her phone to text her brother.

When asked why only six of the twenty-nine pupils in the class would be changing their diets, Phillips shrugged. “Probably everyone else will write the paragraph saying they did the assignment without actually having done it. That kind of cheating bothers me, but, y’know, it’s really none of my business what everyone else does.”

Walker had a different theory. “People don’t really look at the answers when they do a survey like that. They just click through. Probably everyone else in the class just chose random answers on the survey, or they didn’t realize this assignment meant they would have to change their diet.”

Mr. Moore was contacted, but at press time, had only sent a poorly punctuated email saying he was at the basketball game and didn’t have time to comment.

Children in America’s K-12 public schools are key targets for advertisement of the new nutrition guidelines. The USDA projects they will spend four million dollars on marketing the new food pyramid.

“We are projecting about half of that will be spent on huge posters of the updated food pyramid for school cafeterias that serve lunches entirely disconnected from any nutritional guidance whatsoever,” Commissioner Clark stated. Another large chunk of the budget is apportioned toward incentivizing textbook publishers to fast-track new editions of science and health textbooks containing the new food pyramid, although the vast majority of schools will continue to use their 20-year-old texts that still contain the 2005 “MyPyramid” food pyramid, with vertical slices to represent each food group.

“Yeah, our health book’s a bit behind the times,” Walker noted, opening it to the page containing the outdated nutritional guidance. “So it’s totally useless for this assignment. Also, mine is held together with duct tape, and somebody drew mustaches in blue pen on every single picture of a person in this book.”

Commissioner Clark reports she is satisfied with the results of the food pyramid outreach. “Six! That’s three times the number of people who reported they were changing their diet when MyPlate was released! I’m excited about exploring the potential of high school health class assignments as further avenues for positive survey results on the effectiveness of nutrition guidelines.”

When asked how the other three hundred forty-eight million Americans were responding to the new nutritional guidance, Clark replied, “Well, those that believe the ideas presented in the new food pyramid have been eating that way for years, probably since keto, high-fat, low-carb diets became popular in the mid 2010s. And those who have different ideas about nutrition will probably keep eating whatever other way they’ve been eating. But let me tell you, this has the potential to be a huge shake-up for the people who still believe in the carb-heavy 1992 pyramid!"

Commissioner Clark’s research has revealed that there are eleven people in the United States who, on a survey, stated they follow the 1992 food pyramid for nutritional guidance “Very closely.” Further investigation has revealed that these are all students at Highland Middle School, where both the lunchroom posters and the health class textbooks are nearly thirty years out of date.