Food Pyramid Tracker: About and Benefits

Food Pyramid Tracker: One of the best features of the new Food Pyramid structure is the introduction of the highly interactive food pyramid tracker, an online tool that is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for the year 2005. It is a major development because the old Food Pyramid had no such translation for people. It was merely an icon to be interpreted by the people on their own. This resulted in not only a lack of understanding of the same, but a faulty interpretation of the food pyramid. The food pyramid tracker helped in reaching out to the people, in terms of making the Food Pyramid a reality for them. It is easy, freely available, and simple to understand. At the same time, you can also take out printouts of your results.

Know about Food Pyramid Tracker

Known as MyPyramid Tracker, the online tool helps you to understand your dietary needs, the current status of physical activity and nutrition intake, information on the different food groups and recommendations, based on the information that you feed in.

The food pyramid tracker or the MyPyramid Tracker is one of the most popular tools for people. It is divided into two different sections, namely Food Intake Assessment and Physical Activity Assessment. The former is a tool, according to which, you can assess your daily intake of nutrients, calorie intake, messages related to the different food groups, a comparison of the different groups and guidance as per the standards set by the Government. All you need to do in the process is add the amount of food you have consumed throughout the day. This assessment can even be tracked over a month by checking your status frequently. The Physical Activity Assessment, a separate worksheet on the official website, enables you to check your physical status by feeding in details on how much exercise you do the whole day, the nature and the time spent on the same. This is besides the information on all the routine activities that you do the whole day. While you receive a score after every evaluation, MyPyramid Tracker enables you to check the amount of physical activity you need over the days and you can track the recommendations over a year.

Benefits of Food Pyramid Tracker

In order to fully use this food pyramid tracker and avail of all the benefits, you need to, however, register at the website. However, you can also get a general status as a guest user as well. For this, you need to feed in general information such as age, gender, height and weight. You can then proceed on to find the status for either your food intake or physical activity status. You can even save the information you have filled and come back to the same the next day. Thus, as a major initiative of the government, it enables the people to be more proactive and more responsible for their own good health. This may be why the food pyramid tracker has been introduced in schools as part of an exercise in their curriculum.

Read also: Food Pyramid History: Generation