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.

But Dunn has doubts about the efficacy of the tool. "As a menu planner, I'm not sure it's going to be used as such."

Problem Two: The MyPyramid Menu Planner is built around a relatively small database of about 1,000 foods that limits the tool's capacity to handle diets that stray outside the American meat-and-potatoes norm.

When I used the tool, its database of food choices often did not include foods I typically eat. Davé, a vegetarian of South Asian descent, also found that foods she typically eats did not easily translate into the framework of the MyPyramid system.

Haven of the USDA said that in designing the tool the department selected a representative sample of the most commonly eaten foods, drawn primarily from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2002, a major government survey of Americans' eating habits.

"This is a quick and dirty approach to help consumers get started and get their food groups straight," she said.

The database includes an interesting mix of choices. It includes 61 condiments, 23 types of candy, 20 alcoholic beverages, 14 types of salad dressing and 36 types of breakfast cereal. Cassava with Creole sauce and potato pudding are also included. Hummus, a staple in my home, was included, but tempeh, a soyfood I serve with cooked greens, was not.

Problem Three: The MyPyramid Menu Planner takes a food-based, rather than nutrient-based, approach to assessing diets. This flaw can result in inaccurate and misleading dietary guidance.

For example, the Menu Planner does not give credit when calculating calcium intake when you enter high-calcium foods such as tofu, beans, cashews and soymilk.

Some groups choose not to drink milk, and some cannot. Rates of lactose intolerance tend to be high among African-Americans, for instance. "If you were a vegan, it would be a problem," Davé said. "Most of my clients are African-American and don't drink milk. At least 70 percent of the world's adults do not digest milk," she said.

Looking at it more closely, the Menu Planner puts heavy emphasis on a single food that makes up an entire category -- the milk group -- in the MyPyramid dietary guidance system. The system gives you credit for eating milk with lots of salt and fat (cheese) and milk with fat and added sugar (ice cream).

But eat a bowl of calcium-rich garbanzo beans? Zippo. It does not compute. If your calcium comes from nondairy sources, the Planner shows a deficit in servings from the milk group.

I asked USDA about this problem and was told that the Menu Planner isn't meant to work for everyone. If you want a more precise dietary analysis, the department points to the MyPyramid Menu Tracker, available at the same Web site as the Menu Planner.

"The Tracker is an older tool with a much larger food base," said Trish Britten, a nutrition scientist with the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. "The Tracker has over 4,000 data items.

"For a general picture, a quick and easy approach, use the Planner," said Britten. She said the Planner is intended to be useful for school kids and people who are not as interested in going into more depth in analyzing their diets.

So we spent $550,000 developing a tool best used by kids and people uninterested in in-depth analysis of their diets?

Despite the time, effort and money, the truth remains: If you're looking for help designing a health-supporting diet, this government has chosen not to provide it.