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America’s New Dietary Advice Trying to get Americans

游客2023-12-11  36
问题                         America’s New Dietary Advice
    Trying to get Americans to eat a healthy diet is a frustrating business. Even the best-designed public-health campaigns cannot seem to compete with the tempting flavours of the snack-food and fast-food industries and their fat-and sugar-loaded products. The results are apparent on a walk down any American street—more than 60 % of Americans are overweight, and a full quarter of them are overweight to the point of obesity.
    Now, health advocates say, an ill-conceived redesign has taken one of the more successful publichealth campaigns—the Food Guide Pyramid—and rendered it confusing to the point of uselessness. Some of these critics worry that America’s Department of Agriculture caved in to pressure from parts of the food industry anxious to protect their products.
    The Food Guide Pyramid was a graphic which emphasizes that a healthy diet is built on a base of grains, vegetables and fruits, followed by ever-decreasing amounts of dairy products, meat, sweets and oils. The agriculture department launched the pyramid in 1992 to replace its previous programme, which was centred on the idea of four basic food groups. The " Basic Four" campaign showed a plate divided into quarters, and seemed to imply that meat and dairy products should make up half of a healthy diet, with grains, fruits and vegetables making up the other half. It was replaced only over the strenuous objections of the meat and dairy industries.
    The old pyramid was undoubtedly imperfect. It failed to distinguish between a doughnut and a whole-grain roll, or a hamburger and a skinless chicken breast, and it did not make clear exactly how much of each foodstuff to eat. It did, however, manage to convey the basic idea of proper proportions in an easily understandable way. The new pyramid, called "My Pyramid", has been simplified to a mere logo. The food groups are replaced with unlabelled, multicoloured vertical stripes. Anyone who wants to see how this translates into a healthy diet is invited to go to a website, put in their age, sex and activity level, and get a custom-designed pyramid, complete with healthy food choices and suggested portion sizes. This is fine for those who are motivated, but might prove too much effort for those who most need such information.
    Admittedly, the designers of the new pyramid had a tough job to do. They were supposed to condense the advice in the 84-page United States’ Dietary Guidelines into a simple, meaningful graphic suitable for printing on the back pf a cereal box. Nevertheless, many health advocates believe the new graphic is a missed opportunity. On the other hand, it is not clear how much good even the best graphic could do. Surveys found that 80% of Americans recognized the old Food Guide Pyramid—a big success in the world of public-health campaigns. Yet only 16% followed its advice. [br] In the author’s opinion, the Food Guide Pyramid is______.
选项 A、close to perfect
B、extremely puzzling
C、troublesome to some people
D、accepted by the public
答案 D
解析 本题考查作者观点。题干中the Food Guide Pyramid指的是旧的膳食指南金字塔。第四段首句中作者对它进行了评价：无疑是不完善的，不能将甜面圈与全麦卷、汉堡包与去皮鸡胸脯肉区分开来，由此排除[A]。[B]是第二段首句中健康提倡者对新的食物金字塔的看法，认为它令人困惑到毫无用处的程度。第四段末作者指出，新的食物金字塔对那些最需要膳食指导信息的人来说太费事了，而非“膳食指南金字塔”，因此[C]也应排除。全文最后作者引用了研究数据，指出旧的膳食指南金字塔得到大多数美国人的认可，是公共健康运动的一大成功，因此[D]符合作者观点，是正确选项。
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