MyPlate, the Food Pyramid, and Our Nutrition Guidance

We were proud to serve as a National Partner with MyPlate, and we still believe it is one of the best nutrition icons ever created. It's a simple, visual message that made science-backed, healthy eating easy to understand for millions of people, and we will continue to support the customers and programs who choose to use it.

At the same time, we respect the science and process behind the Dietary Guidelines Committee's recommendations, and we stay current as those recommendations evolve. For clients who are required to use the Pyramid, we continue to provide those materials.

We use both. MyPlate is a simple, visual guide for building a single meal, reminding you to fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables. The inverted pyramid takes a broader view of your overall diet, highlighting whole foods as the foundation of your daily choices and pointing out recent research on ultra-processed foods and health risks.

Across all our resources, regardless of the icon or framework used, our core message remains the same: fill your plate with an abundance of real, whole foods. We have also been closely following research on ultra-processed foods and their health risks, and we support the current guidance to choose whole foods over heavily processed ones whenever possible.

We keep our content aligned not only with the Dietary Guidelines but with other leading health authorities on heart disease and diabetes, as well as World Health Organization recommendations.

We will continue to offer MyPlate materials and the Pyramid for those who want them, alongside the same simple healthy-plate message we were teaching even before MyPlate was launched. Good nutrition doesn't depend on any single icon. It depends on the food you choose to buy, prepare, and eat. In our digital age, there are many challenges posed by false information, and consumers are pressed for skills, time, and money to make the right decisions and put good meals on their tables. Above all, we support today's nutrition educators, who face an uphill battle every day, swimming upstream against a food system built on processed convenience, a flood of nutrition misinformation, fast food on every corner, and the real constraints of tight budgets. Whether they reach for MyPlate, the food pyramid, or both, we are here to support the tools that help them do that work.

Here is a path of the USDA Food Icon over the years:

Food Guide Pyramid (1992) → MyPyramid (2005) → MyPlate (2011) → Inverted Food Pyramid (2026)

One study shows that people who are aware of the USDA food icons have a higher-quality diet. But many low-income individuals who have limited education have not heard of them. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212267218308591) So it is up to all of us to keep promoting a balanced diet based on whole foods.