Food group plans are one of the most widely used tools for diet planning. Food group plans allow someone, most often a public health official or dietician overseeing a nutrition program, to build a diet from clusters of foods that are similar in nutrient content. One serving of each group represents a set of calories and nutrients supplied by foods in that cluster. Each group differs in its allotment of calories and nutrients.

Food group plans are useful in that they make it a bit easier to plan and understand what kind of consumption patterns will equate an adequate and balanced diet. In most cases food group plans are used as a method of instruction, a way to convey to users a prescribed diet. For instance the most famous food group plan is the USDA's food pyramid. In the past it has showed the food groups that should be eaten in greater quantities at the bottom (the wide base of the pyramid), and smaller quantities at the top (the point). More recently the USDA has changed their approach and turned each food group into vertical slivers. In their new approach recommended serving amounts are less obvious-actually, it seems as though the USDA wants to keep the pyramid "brand", while moving to a more individualized prescription that cannot be conveyed in a simple graphic.

In our food group plan, we have tried to keep the graphic as simple as possible, and at the same time keep it as flexible as possible for the individual user. We don't prescribe any certain allotments of each food group. We think individuals will be better at figuring out the best food group plan is for themselves. We have built our food group planner in a way that users can easily see the amount of calories and nutrients that their personalized food group plan will contain.



Our serving sizes are based on standard serving sizes that have been around for over 30 years, these are the same as the servings you hear about when the USDA encourages the public to eat a certain amount of veggies a day, and for the most part are the same as the serving sizes represented on food labels. It is important to understand that serving sizes are not the same as portion sizes. In the past 30 years since the advent of standard servings the average American portion size has increased dramatically. This means that one portion of vegetables or chicken or whatever else you may eat could easily equal several servings of that food group. It is important to grasp these differences, over time as you begin to use the food group plan and log your food you will become more intimately familiar with their amounts and how your personal portion sizes relate to the standard serving sizes.

Another thing that is important to point out is we decided not to follow the USDAs five food groups. In doing our research for this site, time and again public health officials, doctors, nutritionist and dieticians have been very critical of the old five groups used by the USDA. Most criticism has to do with the fact that these food groups have remained the same over such a long period of time, even with new research showing that it might be better for the groups to be broken up. For instance, pretty much every government entity who gives dietary advice has encouraged the public to eat more whole grains. To us it just makes sense to separate whole grains from refined ones so that users could have a better understanding how many servings of each (whole and refined grains) they were consuming and could actually see the difference between the two in terms of calories and nutrient content. The other major criticism has to do with the impact of special interests in defining which foods fall into one of the major groups, after all the USDA is responsible for encouraging American agricultural products as well as providing dietary recommendations. Fortunately for us we do not have to worry about any of these pressures, and have been able to break the original five groups into a better more rational set of eleven groups.

For the most part we started out with the original USDA food groups and divided them as we saw fit, for instance we separated the meat group into two groups: Red Meat and Pork, & Poultry, Fish and Eggs. In other cases we have moved certain foods out of their USDA food groupings entirely; most notably we have moved potatoes from the vegetable grouping into one with refined grains/carbs. While this might seem a little confusing at first it is easy to catch on, and in the long run having eleven food groups instead of 5 allows our food group plan to be more illustrative, and more flexible as you can pick and choose between groups with a more direct description of each group.

The final thing that needs to be understood is the RDAs are for average daily intake, and this is true for the food group plan too. As you add and subtract servings for a day it doesn't necessarily mean you have to eat those servings every single day, but over a period of days it will average out to that. Within the thinjoy application we average you actual servings over the last five days of logged food.

Using the food group plan is pretty straight forward. The idea is to try to find a plan that most closely resembles your current eating patterns while hitting your target calories, and meeting nutrient adequacy needs. On the food group plan available outside of the application calories are set to 2,500 calories and the nutrient information is set for a 30 year old female. Increase servings by clicking on the plus buttons above the appropriate food group, remove servings by clicking on minus buttons. Use the pull down menu to select from several pre-built templates. Inside the application users can start with the templates and customize it to meet their needs.

We have found that most people do not have a very good idea of what their normal calorie consumption is let alone the servings of different food groups that they eat. Inside the application this is all done automatically, so users can easily see where they might want to reduce servings and where they should increase servings. They can see their set plan and their actual reading simultaneously and use this to either set their plan to something closer to their actual consumption, or try to change their consumption to match their set plan.

Please feel free to play around with the food group plan we provide for free by clicking on the try it out button. And we hope you will sign up for thinjoy so you can see how this feature works within the larger thinjoy system. Enjoy.

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