The Food Balance Wheel suggests an alternate interpretation of the USDA Food Guide Pyramid

Food guide pyramid

A food guide pyramid is a triangular or pyramid-shaped nutrition guide divided into sections to show the recommended intake for each food group. The first food pyramid was published in Sweden in 1974. The most widely known food pyramid was introduced by the United States Department of Agriculture...

 recommendations for balanced eating. Created by author Art Dragon, it converts the principles of the food pyramid from a number-based format to a visual presentation that may be more accessible to users interested in balanced eating.

Background

Presenting food groups on a pyramid is a wonderful concept, but fully implementing the guidelines involves somehow keeping track of food eaten throughout the day, associating each with a specific food group, comparing the total servings within each group against recommendations, and adjusting meals where necessary.

The Food Balance Wheel was developed to provide a more visual alternative, assuming most people would be more inclined to actually use a method requiring less counting, recording, and comparing.

Theory

Common components of different food groups can each be represented as a continuum of spokes on a wheel. These spokes can then be sized to roughly the same proportions as the food group servings on the food pyramid. Doing this will convert the chore of listing foods eaten at every meal to the much simpler task of marking food servings in the slots provided around the periphery of the wheel. With this arrangement, choosing foods equally spaced from all around the wheel will automatically provide a balanced mix of nutrients equivalent to that recommended by the food pyramid. In addition, ‘balancing’ the wheel by continually choosing foods from the blank slots will help ensure a diversity of nutrients.

Evolution

Design of the Food Balance Wheel started with a modified food pyramid at its center, representing the seed from which the wheel was derived. The placement and relative size of each wheel spoke reflects the pyramid’s food groups and serving sizes. The unique sequencing of the different foods was based on the USDA Nutritive Value of Foods tables . This arrangement presents the three main nutrient categories (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) as a continuum of different foods transitioning from one to the next, based on the relative proportions of each nutrient. In addition, this layout was adjusted to separate fiber from non-fiber foods, and to place foods containing saturated fat in order from lowest to highest to help steer the user to more healthful food choices.

Benefits of use

A marked up Food Balance Wheel:

• Serves as a visual status of how well the user has balanced recent meals.
• Keeps track of foods that have been eaten recently.
• Suggests which foods to choose for the next few meals.
• Encourages variety resulting from choosing foods from many different groups.
• Can be used for small, large, or multiple meals throughout the day or week.

See also

• Diet and cancer
  Diet and cancer
  Diet and cancer are associated. While it is not yet possible to provide quantitative estimates of the overall risks, it has been estimated that 35 percent of cancer deaths may be related to dietary factors. Almost all cancers are caused by environmental factors, and of these, 30–40% of cancers are...
  
  
• Diet and heart disease
• Diet (multiple sclerosis)
  Diet (multiple sclerosis)
  The Swank Diet is a low saturated fat diet for the management of multiple sclerosis developed by Dr. Roy L. Swank , which he introduced in 1948...
  
  
• Health food
  Health food
  The term health food is generally used to describe foods that are considered to be beneficial to health, beyond a normal healthy diet required for human nutrition. However, the term is not precisely defined by national regulatory agencies such as the U.S...
  
  
• Health promotion
  Health promotion
  Health promotion has been defined by the World Health Organization's 2005 Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World as "the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health"...
  
  
• Nutrigenomics
  Nutrigenomics
  Nutrigenomics is the study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression. It is about how our DNA is transcribed into mRNA and then to proteins and provides a basis for understanding the biological activity of food components...
  
  
• Nutritional genomics
  Nutritional genomics
  Nutritional genomics is a science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health.It can be divided into two disciplines:*Nutrigenomics: studies the effect of nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in...
  
  
• Standard American Diet
• Raw foodism
  Raw foodism
  Raw foodism is the practice of consuming uncooked, unprocessed, and often organic foods as a large percentage of the diet....
  
  
• CRON-diet
• Nutritional gatekeeper
  Nutritional gatekeeper
  Nutritional gatekeeper has been used to refer to the person in a household who typically makes the purchasing and preparation decisions related to food. Nutritional gatekeepers can be a parent, grandparent, sibling, or caregiver...