Many food and nutritional issues are complex and genuinely difficult to understand. But often, it is conventional nutritional advice, turned into dogma that opposes intelligent, well-thought-out methods of diet revision. For too many years we lived with the "four food groups," a nutritional dogma taught at universities for over four decades.  Often, the potential benefits of diet revision in the solution of health problems are ignored.  The four food groups (meat, milk, grains, and vegetables-fruit) were promoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1950's as the proper, official method of achieving a "balanced diet". The US FDA collaborated, teaching this system to the nation, and a remarkably strict nutritional dogma emerged in the USA and Canada.

In the 1990's official dietary recommendations in the USA and Canada changed to a food pyramid which gave more value to eating fruits, vegetables and grains. Harvard's Walter Willet reviewed the new recommendations and stated: " The dietary pyramid released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture attempts to translate current nutritional knowledge to a recommended eating pattern in terms of food groups. Inevitably, such a document represents a mix of well-supported findings, educated guesses, and political compromises with powerful economic interests such as the dairy and meat industries...optimal health can be achieved from a diet that emphasizes a generous intake of vegetables and fruit. Such plant-enriched diets, as embodied by other cultures can be not only healthy, but interesting and enjoyable as well."  

We recommend studying the US official guide to our students. We suggest that they approach the guidelines as a theoretical structure and as advice to a population of people with diverse needs. The advice is often not applicable to individuals whose nutritional needs are not met by these recommendations and whose health may be at risk if they follow the food selection advice. Since physicians are managing individuals who are usually not healthy, official dietary guidelines are not very useful.

A skillful nutritional therapist will know the guidelines as one way to organize food selection but will also know the many exceptions  to these rules and will use other methods of individual  diet design such as the  Alpha Nutrition Program.