USDA's nutrition tool fails

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent more than a half-million dollars and two and a half years designing a dietary assessment tool that has little value. The USDA's new MyPyramid Menu Planner, which was unveiled this month, doesn't work because the MyPyramid approach doesn't work

As I've written before, the USDA pyramid, introduced in 2005, is nothing more than a dumbed-down logo that conveys no information concerning what people should eat. The USDA designed it that way, intending to follow up with online tools meant to help guide people's food choices. The MyPyramid Menu Planner is one of those tools. But it falls short of its purported goal.

To try using it, go to www.MyPyramid.gov and click on the MyPyramid Menu Planner link. To get started, you enter your age, sex, height, weight and level of physical activity. From there, you enter the types and amounts of foods you eat. The system is meant to provide feedback in the form of colorful bar graphs, charts and text, rating your diet by how closely it meets recommended servings of foods from the USDA's food pyramid.

Your food data can be saved for up to a week, but to do that, you have to create an account with a user ID and password. Personal data are saved on the agency's server, but USDA does not look at or share the data with anyone, including food marketers or insurance companies, according to Jackie Haven, a USDA representative.

Haven told me the agency monitors the number of user visits the site receives, though she could not tell me how many users had visited the site in its first week of public operation. The new tool is meant to be used by individuals as well as by school teachers, dietitians and other health educators working with groups or providing individual counseling, according to a USDA news release.

So why doesn't the MyPyramid Menu Planner work?

Problem One: It's not reliable and isn't easy to use.

During more than a week of testing from different computers, I found that several times after I entered a user name, password and food information, the system shut me out unexpectedly. I sometimes had to re-enter my food data when I returned to the site.

Nilam Davé had similar trouble. Davé is a registered dietitian with the Durham County Health Department who has been testing the tool for possible use in a weight management program she leads.

She had difficulty logging in with her user name and password when she revisited the site and after registering had to re-enter her personal information. She, too, found the tool shut down unexpectedly at one point.

The complexity of the system will also serve as a barrier to all but the most motivated users.

Carolyn Dunn, a nutrition professor with N.C. Cooperative Extension Service at N.C. State University, agreed.

"Anything we can do to help people make better food choices, I'm all for," Dunn said. "Having said that, it seems very complex to me. You would need a fairly high level of understanding of food to pick the correct entry.

"Our research shows that simplicity and quick are what everyone wants, and it's neither," Dunn said. "The families we work with would not find it helpful in planning a menu."

I asked USDA whether the department conducted user testing while it developed the Menu Planner.

"We had usability testing," Haven said. "It's like a focus group, except we had a facilitator talk with one person at a time."

Haven estimated that the agency tested the tool with approximately 20 people during a couple of days, choosing individuals representing different demographic profiles -- some older, some younger, for example.