I really miss the “Four Food Group” recommendations of the FDA.  From 1956 to 1992, the recommended diet for Americans was to eat something from the Four Food Groups every day. 

The Groups were simple.  Milk, Meat, Fruit and Vegetables, and Bread and Cereal. The FDA did not confuse us with portions or ratios.  Just eat something from each group every day. You will be healthy. Other foods were consumed to round out the meals.  These included butter, salad dressing, cooking oils, jellies, sauces, and syrups.     

The fifties and sixties were my formative years for developing great eating habits and I closely followed FDA recommendations.  Using the federal government’s guidelines, I crafted a perfectly balanced and healthy diet.  Let’s run through a typical day’s menu plan.   

Breakfast.  Bacon and eggs, raisin bread toast with lots of butter, and hot chocolate.  Bang, all four food groups right out of the blocks.  You may have missed the fruits and veggies but the raisins qualify.  Obviously, I used milk in the hot chocolate.  I was confused with the appropriate category for eggs.  Is it dairy?  You find them in the dairy section of the supermarket.  Is it meat?  They have lots of protein like meat.  I guess the classic question even applies to the FDAs Four Food Groups.  What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Lunch.  A ham and Swiss cheese sandwich, a big pile of potato chips, a dill pickle and a glass of milk.  Four for four again.  After reading the guidelines, I wasn’t sure that potatoes are vegetables so I added the pickle to be certain I hit all four.

Dinner.  Spaghetti with Italian sausage sauce, apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert.  Hey, spaghetti hits three of the four food groups (pasta, tomatoes, and Italian sausage).  Apple pie satisfies the fruit recommendation and reinforces the bread goal. Ice cream bullseyes the milk target.

Late Night Snack.  A pepperoni and Canadian bacon pizza with a bottle of Faygo Cream Soda.  A great and healthy way to end the day.  Again we hit all four food groups (cheese, pepperoni and Canadian bacon, tomato sauce and pizza crust).  In addition, based on the Faygo’s sugar content, I worked some syrup into the mix.  The late night snack was usually consumed on Saturday evening while watching a monster movie on Shock Theater.

Every one of these meals was in total compliance with the FDA guidelines.  Talk about eating healthy!  It required a lot of work and diligence but I was committed to forming excellent eating habits that would last me a lifetime.    

Things started to go down hill when the FDA dropped the Four Food Group recommendation and moved to the Food Pyramid.  The Pyramid was in place from 1992 to 2005. The FDA expanded the food groups to six.  It separated fruits from vegetables and added oils and sweets.  Worse, they defined portion sizes and recommended how many portions of each category you should consume each day.  All of the categories had specific daily portion numbers except oils and sweets that simply said “use sparingly”. 

My staple of raisin bread toast came under fire.  I got a couple of portions of grains but I did not get anything for raisins.  They qualified as fruit (dried grapes) but there were not enough of them to give even one credit for portion size.  I always preferred the raisin bread with icing on top.  That did not fit the Four Food Group standard but it did come under the oils and sweets designation of the pyramid.  

The only good thing about the Food Pyramid was the oil and sweets category.  “Sparingly” is a subjective term. If I had iced raisin bread toast, a snickers bar as a mid-morning snack, and a chocolate malt after dinner, to me, these all could be classified as “sparingly” servings.   

The real challenge with the Food Pyramid was the proportions.  When I compared my very healthy Food Group diet to the new guidelines, I was short on the number of fruit and veggie portions.  I would have been okay if the Pyramid recognized potatoes for what they are: vegetables.  But they put them in an asterisk category called starchy vegetables and they put a significant limitation on everything in the category.  Starchy vegetables are a lot like controlled substances.   You really like them but you are not supposed to have them.  Somehow the triple cheeseburger on an onion roll that I purchased for lunch from Crazy Jims put me way over the meat portion size limit for lunch. In addition, the extra large fries blew away two days worth of starchy vegetable portions.

The Food Pyramid was a clear step backwards in healthy dieting so I was not surprised that the brain trust at FDA made significant modifications to the recommendations in 2005.

The FDA cannot decide on what is a healthy diet.  In 2005, the Food Pyramid was replaced with something called My Pyramid and in 2011 they replaced My Pyramid with My Plate.   I quit trying to follow Federal recommendations when they dumped the Food Pyramid.  I decided that rather than do something that is right for the general population, I would do something that was right for me. 

I returned to my Four Food Group diet and initiated conversations with my Primary Care Doc and Cardiologist.  They said that my numbers looked pretty good but they did not like my diet.  When they talk about “numbers” it is the result of 50 or 60 blood tests that each of them run every year.  The blood tests all have numbers and they all have a desired healthy range based on some kind of standards developed by anonymous people in the medical community. 

The Docs are about as confusing as the FDA.  The Primary Care Physician recommended a high fiber diet with low levels of protein.  A lot of soybeans and small trees that are pulverized into juice with a special blender that is more powerful than the bush hog I pulled behind my Kubota tractor. The staple of the diet is a series of hideous green protein shakes.  Forget ever having a burger and fries.

The Cardiologist says that a variation of the Mediterranean diet, along with some modifications from research with long living populations, is ideal.  They have compiled the South Mediterranean Beach Asian Fusion diet with Outer Mongolian influences.  I YouTubed an interview with a 104 year old Mongol who was speaking in an ancient Asian language.  The interviewer complimented the man on his dedication to a healthy diet.  His response was translated as follows:  “I have been eating sardines in heavy fish oil for 80 years.  I hate it!  I would gladly trade fifteen of those years for an occasional steak, a lot of French fries and a few onion rings!” 

So I am buying in to the Mongol philosophy.  “The more you don’t eat the things you are not supposed to eat, the longer you will live not to enjoy them.”  I returned to my original, 1959, Four Food Group diet.  My last blood test showed total cholesterol of 133 without any medication. Really good numbers.  I’m not interested in dropping that number to 125. 

My doctors may find this disappointing but the last thing I want to do is die with perfect blood test results.