The old food pyramid very much villainized that. It said, hey, carbohydrates are good. Fat is bad. Fat is minimal. Oils are bad.

There’s a lot that needed to change, right, from this old food pyramid. And so let’s talk about now what has changed in the new food pyramid. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Hey, have you seen the new food pyramid that has come out? I remember being 12 years old and seeing pictures of the USDA food pyramid with all of the breads on the bottom and working your way up the pyramid where you were basically shown what to eat and how much of each food group to be eating. Just recently here at the beginning of 2026, the USDA has released a new food pyramid.

So we’re going to talk about that today on this episode. We’re going to talk about the differences between the old food pyramid and the new food pyramid and point out some things. And if you haven’t seen it, Make sure you watch this podcast episode as well. If you’re listening today, we encourage you to view it on YouTube so you can see the images of the old food pyramid and the new food pyramid. We’re going to discuss kind of those differences and get Dr. Fisher’s take on all of this. So let’s reveal, let’s jump into this.

So, hey, Dr. Fisher. Hey, how old were you when you first became aware of the old food pyramid? Do you have any memories associated with the old food pyramid, first of all?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So in the UK, we have kind of a food plate, which is basically kind of the same thing, but it’s pictographic, is a plate that shows kind of how much of different things to put on your plate. So it’s more kind of devoted to an individual meal rather than you know, the number of servings per week or per day. The food pyramid itself, I don’t know when I first kind of saw it. It was never sold in the same way. Obviously it’s USDA.

So it’s not, it’s not a UK kind of creation. So I don’t know when I first saw it, but I’m familiar with it. And I’m familiar with obviously the criticisms of it over the years. So yeah, but probably don’t have the same history with it as you do, Amy.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, I remember looking at it on cereal boxes, just sitting there at home eating boxes of cereal, of course, because breads were at the bottom. But okay, for our listeners, let’s kind of go through what the old food pyramid looked like. Should we go from bottom to top and talk about that?

Yeah. One of the things that was definitely prominent in my upbringing, probably from my family and certainly from any kind of person my parents’ age, was that carbohydrates were the dominant part of every meal. And the old food pyramid really embodies that. The base layer, almost the foundation of our food is breads and grains, rice, pasta, anything like that. I mean, I think the old food pyramid we’re looking at now, I think it has pastries, on it as well and pies.

So it was clearly ingrained in this kind of grain and bread and cereals, as you said, as the key staple part of a meal or of somebody’s diet. Yes. so six to eleven servings of bread. So basically it’s like the foundation of every meal.

is what they were saying. Right, right. So bread, yeah, bread, cereal, rice. And they made no distinction, of course, between refined grains and whole grains. So they just kind of grouped it all together. And of course, remember, this is not to criticize the people that created it, because some information is better than no information.

But of course, there were a lot of criticisms around it, because it was hailed as being kind of pitched based on you know, supporting industrial agriculture. And those are sort of the big criticisms around the old food pyramid.

But yeah, that’s certainly the bulk of the pyramid there. Yeah. And we’ll come back to sort of some of the limitations or problems with the old food pyramid in a second. But let’s move up the old food pyramid.

So six to 11 servings of breads at the bottom of the food pyramid.

And then let’s work our way up. What’s next? Yeah. So next we’ve got basically fruits or vegetables of any kind, and it doesn’t distinguish between, and of course, maybe we shouldn’t. But of course, one of the things that we now have in modern society is we don’t eat seasonal fruits or vegetables because they’re accessible because of import and export. But the next part, and probably for good reason, is fruit and vegetables.

And I’m trying to see the recommendation. It’s there on the pyramid. It’s three to five servings of vegetables or two to four servings of fruit. So that’s pretty good.

I think that’s pretty solid.

What are your thoughts? Yes.

I mean, I’m thinking about like if you’re following this when you build your meals and you have a bowl of pasta or a huge slice of bread on the plate and a bunch of fruit, I mean, you’re getting quite a lot of carbohydrates is what I see so far. Right, right. So interestingly, I would always say that our carbohydrate content should really come from fruit and vegetables. It shouldn’t really come from grains and certainly not refined grains. Um, but our fruit and vegetable of course contains a huge amount of vitamin and mineral that we require, but it also contains a lot of fiber that we need in our diet.

And I don’t remember whether these recommendations came with considerations of carbohydrate or proteins, fats and fiber. Um, but of course the big problem is that we very quickly.

took to our fruit and vegetable intake being through smoothies or through fruit shakes or fruit drinks, which of course lack all the fiber. So they’re great as far as the nutritional content, but they’re very poor as far as the fiber, which means that our body has to react to the sugar differently. Okay, so let’s say we’re following this and we’re getting all of that.

Where is our protein? What’s next? Yeah. So next is interesting because it kind of includes dairy, so milk, yogurt, cheese, and also fish into the same section of the pyramid.

So it’s saying that, you know, at least a reasonable component of our diet should be dairy products and, or should also be fish of some kind that includes shellfish and includes, uh, you know, what looks like a piece of salmon and things like that. So.

Yeah, so two to three servings of that.

So that’s less than half of the amount of dairy or fish than breads, right?

Right.

In a day.

Right. Okay. And then moving on, the rest of the meat is above that, right?

And that is how many servings a day? Two to three of the regular meats now, non -fish? Yeah, but it moves into, this is interesting, so it moves into non -fish, what I would call like non -fish or non -dairy protein. So it actually specifically says meat, poultry, dry beans, eggs and nuts group two to three servings. But again, a big criticism of it is that it didn’t distinguish between processed meats or cured meats and, you know, fresh or unprocessed meats. And then, of course, it included nuts, which actually are probably legumes, as well as nuts and beans and so on and so forth.

And I think we now recognize those a bit differently as well. But interestingly, at the time, they were all kind of grouped together. Right. Yeah.

Peanuts are legumes and then like the rest of the nuts are mostly like fats. So that’s at the very top of the old food pyramid. It’s fats, oils, sweets, all lumped together at the very top. And it says use sparingly. Yeah, I love that it has a kind of oil for cooking or for salads or things like that. And then it has like a piece of cake next to it, like as though we can just put those into the same category.

It’s interesting, you know, the old food pyramid very much victimized or villainized, I should say, fat. It said, hey, carbohydrates are good. Fat is bad. Fat is minimal. Oils are bad. Cakes and sweets are bad.

You know, maybe meat is bad because of the fat content. But actually, carbohydrates in the form of grains are good.

You can have as much carbohydrate as you want, but as little fat as you can manage. And of course, that’s been a real big swing in our nutritional habits. But that’s certainly the way my My, my diet was influenced growing up by, by peers around me and parents and grandparents that anything that had fat. in it was bad, but if it was carbohydrates, that was fine. Right. 100 % agree.

And this old food pyramid does match, I think, my overall experience of what was available and what we ate as well, because I remember eating a lot of cereal every day for breakfast. Most meals contained grains, pastas, easy crackers, and very, very prevalent. And then, yes, the fats were villainized, and so margarine was a big deal, not butter, right? Very few oils. We had a lot of the Pam cooking spray, which has other chemicals in it and things just to minimize, you know, any fats.

But as we’ve learned over the years, you know, there’s a big difference between unhealthy fats and healthy fats. If you listen to our podcast recently on what should be on my plate and some of the information in our nutrition playbook, you know the value of healthy fats, right? And so There’s a lot that needed to change, right, from this old food pyramid. And so let’s talk about now what has changed in the new food pyramid. Yeah. So the most obvious thing is that the pyramid has actually been inverted.

So they’ve not tried to just change everything’s place. To some extent, you know, the positionings on the food pyramid haven’t changed drastically. It’s just been inverted. And I really like that approach, first of all. But of course, what we can now see is the tip is at the bottom. So what we can have less of is at the bottom of the food pyramid.

And that’s now our grades. So we’ve gone from in 1992 saying you could have as much carbohydrates, you know, six to 11 servings of carbohydrates, um, to now saying you should eat as, you know, very, very little, uh, sort of protein. grains or carbohydrates in that way. And I, and I had the same, same sort of upbringing you did. I can remember getting home from school, having gone sports and run around all day and being, you know, a young sort of teenage boy with a huge appetite. And my, my mom would basically say, you can eat as much bread as you want.

You know, I could sit and eat a whole baguette. Um, I’m not French, I’m English, but for some reason we would have like baguettes of bread, uh, or loaves of bread and I could eat as much of it. I was allowed to eat as much of it as I want.

And, you know, I’m glad to see that’s, that’s really changed. And this recommendation has changed drastically as well. So whole grains now or grains, first of all, are now identified as whole grains. and then minimized in kind of the recommendation. So what’s interesting about this food pyramid is there are not servings listed on it as there were in the previous. It’s just pictures.

So at the very bottom of the food pyramid, you’re seeing whole grains. And then right above that, you’re seeing some fruits and then some nuts and healthy fats in the middle with nuts and things like that. What’s that bowl? What is that bowl near the bananas? Yeah. I don’t know if that’s like a bowl of something.

Is that oatmeal?

Maybe oatmeal with some fruit on top. Yeah.

And then there’s some butter and nuts and some fish, some seafood and eggs and so forth. Yeah. I think the key is that there’s a real big emphasis now on protein, on protein intake. And there’s to some extent differentiation between good and bad fats as well. You know, the fats that I can see on there in the form of say avocados or oil or dairy minimal compared to what you could see on the previous image.

Right. Yeah, at the very top you can see it’s proteins, it’s good source meats and vegetables, followed by quite a good variety of healthy fats, and then fruit is a little bit less than vegetables, and then whole grains at the bottom. What’s missing out of here is processed breads and highly processed cereals and pastas that have very little nutritional value, which I’m happy to see, are not there anymore.

I think, as you say, there’s a real, you know, and there is, there is some dialogue that goes along with this. There’s some, uh, some text around it, um, that you can find on the website and so forth. And it kind of places emphasis on, on real food. The guidelines, uh, discourage ultra processed packaged and sugary items. And certainly there’s not a cake in sight. There’s no, there’s no artificial sweeteners or sugars or cakes or sweets or anything like that, that I can see.

on there. So that’s clearly saying that they’re not a key component of your diet. You know, you can live without these things. Yes. And when you eat whole foods like this, as we know, you know, it’s it’s so much more nutrient dense. I mean, the old food pyramid, if you follow the old food pyramid, I mean, everyone knows, you know, breads are just nutrient poor with high, high, high calorie.

But empty calories, you know, you could eat a whole box of crackers and not be full because you didn’t get any protein out of it. So I’m happy to see, you know, this is if you follow these recommendations, you’re getting a great amount of protein, fiber and healthy fat, which are the building blocks of of health, you know, when it comes to nutrition. So this is a good thing.

Yeah. When I look at the new food pyramid, one of the key things that hits me is pretty much the whole right -hand half, as I look at the pyramid, is fruit and vegetables. From the top, you’ve got carrots, peas, broccoli, and all the way down is then fruit. And it’s obviously identified the difference between vegetables being higher than fruits. Fruits obviously having that sugar content and maybe being seasonal, as I said earlier. So, you know, bananas are the lowest end of the fruit.

And interestingly, different fruits can have different nutrient content based on how ripe they are. So there’s a time when we’re obviously unripe bananas have certain mineral content, but very, very ripe bananas are much, much sweeter, but have quite a different nutrient content as well. I’m not going to get into all of that. I’m not a nutritionist or a dietitian, so I can’t really speak knowledgeably about that, but I’m aware that fruit, based on its time of year and how ripe it is, can be different. Yes. And one thing is if you if you grew up in the low fat era, I mean, this really finally does turn all of that on its head.

You know, it came out years ago that the sugar industry funded a lot of the the studies that support the low fat. You know, if we reduce our dietary fat, then we will become less fat. And we all know that when people followed those guidelines and ate low fat products that were ended up being modified with more sugar and low fat to replace the fat that was taken out of them, it really didn’t pan out the way that people hoped, where people were getting less healthy. And so healthy fats do not make you fat. In fact, the sugar that you eat is ultimately what leads to fat storage. As we know, and as we’ve referenced in the

past and with our Nutrition Playbook episodes. And so what I’m happy to see in here is high -quality fats are right in the middle and it’s not anything to be afraid of. And so whole food eating, don’t be afraid of high -quality meat. Get plenty of vegetables. Prioritize that. Minimal processing.

And this is the way to go. This is the way to go. I’m sure there are people listening who this is a big paradigm shift. I know there’s plenty of people out there who are probably still, you know, following these outdated guidelines, but it’s really encouraging to see that the USDA has finally now, how many years did it take, but updated the guidelines for people to follow. Yeah, and I think it’s really important that we can be accepting of a paradigm shift. I think that this is exactly the purpose of science and the key scientific principles.

That we don’t just accept things, we allow things to change, we allow things to evolve and to move as we gain a better understanding of nutrition of our bodies, of comorbidities and medical conditions and so forth.

And yeah, as we’ve said, you know, we both grew up in an era when fat was villainized and carbohydrates were fine. And now, of course, there’s been, you know, a lot of people swung into like a low carb movement and so forth. So it’s really nice to see a full paradigm shift. And like it shows, the pyramid’s been flipped on its head. And in fact, I kind of always make the analogy that the old guidance of exercise really has taken a paradigm shift in itself as well. You know, the old adage of three sets of 10, you know, is really no longer the gospel as far as exercise and resistance training and what the exercise coach do with two 20 minute workouts and a single set approach is far more

evidence -based than the old sort of three sets of 10 approach. And there’s still a few institutions that are slow to respond, they’re slow to get with the program on that. But I think that as a general rule, the exercise science community and the academic community have moved with the times and said, actually, we don’t need to do hours and hours of strength training and even suggesting hours and hours of strength training is bad because people won’t do it. So we’ve seen a paradigm shift in that area as well.

And the proof is in the pudding. I mean, I know personally and I’ve personally experienced the difference in following the current recommendations of exercise and nutrition. When you eat better, when you focus on protein and whole foods and healthy fats, and you combine that with the right type of exercise, which is strength training, that really changes your body for the better. I’m so much healthier today than I used to be because I am following guidelines that are appropriate for the human body and what it needs. and especially as we get older as well. You know, we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, how important whole food eating is, how important protein prioritization is, and how important strength training is.

So I’m glad to see this is out there.

Go look it up if you are listening to this on audio.

But yeah, this is pretty exciting to see.

Do you have any kind of closing thoughts for us today, Dr. Fisher, about this topic? I think the key thing to remember is that, you know, food pyramid at the time was built around the existing body of research. And a lot of that research has been really heavily criticized in different times. I’m not going to get down that path now, but I think that it’s really nice to see an updated food pyramid and we should be really enthusiastic about embracing that rather than be focusing too much on criticizing the old one. We should just be able to kind of move with the times.

So it was a really nice opportunity to kind of discuss this for our listeners. Absolutely. I know I’m going to show this to my kids and have them memorize it and give them a little quiz after this episode. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, well, thank you so much for talking through this with us and we will see you next week on the podcast.

Until then, we hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode.

Here’s to you and your best health.