The Asian Food Pyramid
by greenz.jp, Tokyo, Japan 
on 09.16.08
I was delighted with the Image of the Day: If Kids Designed the Food Pyramid entry, and here is the Food Pyramid from Japan. This image is widely promoted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. It shows a spinning top to illustrate the nation's goal for "food balance" or a balanced diet. The Japanese guide resembles a spinning top, and note at the very top there is a guy running, as a reminder of the need for exercise!
More details below the fold.
The blue cup at the top shows water and tea.
The yellow section is the largest, representing grains--rice, bread, noodles and pasta. You should get between 5 to 7 servings a day. The green section represents vegetables--such as potato, mushrooms and seaweeds. You should get 5 to 6 servings a day. The brown section represents meat, fish, eggs and soy-bean dishes. You should get about 3 to 5 servings a day.
The last section is broken into two. On the left represents dairy products which you should get about 2 servings per day. And on the right there are fruits (2 servings per day).
There is a little string to the left representing sweets, alcohol, and coffee, which we should all be having in moderation...
I like how the Japanese food guide is based on local conditions, with an emphasis on rice. While Japan imports a lot of food, rice is one crop that the country is still self-sufficient in. I think they have taken food mileage into consideration as well. How about your country's food pyramid? Does it take local environmental factors into consideration?
Written by Martin Frid at greenz.jp, Hat Tip for the inspiration to Our Adventures in Japan, a wonderful blog about Japanese foods.
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Is School Food Harming Kids? Enlist a Labor Day Eat-In To Promote Fresh, Healthy Food
- Eat a Vegetarian Diet, Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by a Ton
- Raw Food for the Rest of Us
- 8 Fun Green Ways to Manage Stress (Kissing is One of Them)
- Six Soothing Summer Beauty Treatments—Fresh from the Farmers' Market
- Fit Into Your Jeans by Friday with this Green Diet and Exercise Routine
This is a fantastic visual representation. It makes sense how different levels are different sizes, and it makes it easier to remember. Plus the running man is well-integrated in the figure.
In the new USDA Food Pyramid, there's no particular reason why each slice must be a certain width. There's no visual mnemonic for what to eat most of and least of, which was the point of having the original pyramid in the first place.
This is an improvement on the USDA's food pyramid but it still needs improvement: it would be nice if the water/tea at the top and each of the segments indicated how much of each you should eat in a day.
Plus, doesn't the drawing look like one of those lamb spit things in a gyro shop?
Hmm...interesting to see that fruits are down at the bottom with a recommendation of only 2 per day. It's a well designed food pyramid though with a predominant emphasis on exercise..a lesson all americans could benefit from.
This is very cool. I think it's much clearer than the USDA's food pyramid. In fact, for a vegetarian like me it's probably a lot easier to follow than the US one.
I might suggest reading Marion Nestle's wonderful (though verbally dense) book 'Food Politics'.
In it, she describes the reworking of the USDA food pyramid in the 1990's. She felt the pyramid should incorporate exercise in some way, and it seems that the Japanese counterpart has done that very nicely.
She also discussed how corporate influence, mainly from cattle associations, pushed to have meat be a much larger section of the pyramid than was necessary. In her view, the food pyramid as designed only to increase consumption, never to limit food intake. Consequently, we have a food pyramid that encourages not only overconsumption, but overconsumption of the wrong types of food. But this is what happens when public information is disseminated not by the researchers, but by the politicians.
Actually the Japanese import a lot of rice, from Thailand and other countries. They still grow a lot of their own, but rice and other crops are the subject of a lot of controversy, because of subsidization and other issues.
Why are potatoes listed as a vegetable instead of a grain/starch? Seems silly to me.
Other than that, this is a pretty well designed pyramid. I might switch the reccomendations for fruits and dairy, but I guess the people who designed the pyramid were concerned about sugar intake.
I remember when I was little (in the 70's) in NYC public schools the food pyramid "dairy" section had a picture of a container of chocolate pudding in it... ahh, those nutty times. But our ideas of health are still so backwards.
I am a vegan so I am obviously going to be slanted one way in my own assessment of things... I do not eat any meat or dairy - - but I still cannot believe ANY country's food pyramid would place meat in a larger section and above the almighty Apple.
Thanks for the comments.
Anthony, the green section is called "fukusai" (side dishes) in the Japanese text. This includes "yasai" (vegetables) and other greens like mushrooms, miso soup (using soymeans and sea weeds) and potatoes. But I thought the English term "side dishes" wasn't exactly correct, so I just translated that as "represents vegetables". Hope that clears things up!
Personally I don't require food pyramids, I'm vegan as well and have, when I switched, researched vegan nutrition very intensively given the huge amount of misinformation everywhere. Shrinking brains and all... :-)
One thing I've always wondered about was "servings". What an odd strategy to use something as abstract as "servings". What does that mean? Here in Europe we use metric grams, and a basic nutrition unit is 100 grams. It's abstract too, but since a bar of chocolate has 100 grams, it's a unit everyone can translate emotionally to picture the mass of food that is being talked about.
I think the German equivalent of "servings" is portion. (Same word too.) But one portion equates one plate of lunch. It can't be that servings means portion, that would be just too much! LOL.
Oh sorry, forgot something.
Two servings of fruits seems ok, in relation to other foods. given that fruits are overrated in their nutrition content. They are just not up to things like green leafy vegetables. Also, some fruits contain lots of sugars and have high glyx indexes.
However, one should remember that things like antioxidants and other micro-nutrients are not very well researched, fruits provide lots of these, so the recommendations might change again sometime in the future.
That's what's so nice about being vegan. If you're informed (B12, Vitamin D) and follow a halfway decent routine, it's so difficult to eat wrongly.
One very important nutrient is forgotten entirely by all food pyramids: enjoyment and sensuality of eating. By all means, don't forget to experience the lust of eating. If you really need to go down on a pack of dates, knock yourself out.
Also, forget everything you were told about coffee. It's all old news. Coffee is a health drink these days... Love the stuff too
and this just feels like spinning plates.