The Healthy Diet Pyramid

The healthy diet pyramid is an illustration showing a nutrition guideline broken up into categories, usually meat and beans, dairy, vegetables, fruits, whole grains and sweets, along with daily serving recommendations.

Function

The healthy diet pyramid is designed to make it easier to distinguish which foods would be a healthy choice for each category.

Types

There are several types of healthy diet pyramids with varying food choices, but all have nutritional value as the basis. These include the vegetarian, Asian, Mediterranean and Latin American pyramids.

Considerations

The pyramid shape of the healthy diet plan generally shows foods people should eat the most of at the bottom and work up to the less healthy items at the top.

Benefits

The healthy diet pyramid provides a guideline for healthy eaters to follow, but also allows for a wide range of foods to be tailored specifically to a person's preferences while combining foods from each category for a variation in tastes.

Misconceptions

There is no one type or category of food that will give a person all the nutritional values they need. The healthy diet pyramid shows ways of getting all the nutrients needed from every type of foods.