The US Department of Agriculture thinks I'm sedentary

Jan 29, 2006 21:56:20

Since my 30th birthday, I've been trying to make a few incremental lifestyle changes. In addition to reducing my regular intake of alcohol and removing some unnecessary carcinogens, I've changed my diet significantly. Grape Nuts with soy milk in the morning, fruit and some variety of salad for dinner (when I'm not at Patxi's), and a moderate portion of whatever shows up at the office for lunch.
When I went to pour my Grape Nuts this morning, I noticed a URL on the side of the box for the US Department of Agriculture's "new" food pyramid. MyPyramid.gov appears to be trying to curb the obesity explosion in the US by providing easy to understand information and guidelines on diet. After clicking around a few pages, I filled out the box labelled "My Pyramid Plan". The input is age, sex, and daily physical activity (the last two are apparently unrelated). Okay:

Age: 30
Sex: Male ("infrequently" was not an option)
Physical Activity: This is where it got a little complicated. The options presented are "Less than 30 minutes", "30 to 60 minutes", and "More than 60 minutes". Since March of last year, I've been walking to work everyday. When you work for a startup, that means six or seven days a week. My walk is about 1.5 miles, and takes me just under 30 minutes if I walk briskly, meaning I walk for about an hour a day. However, since the cold and rain have come, I've been taking advantage of my coworkers' generosity, and I've been taking a ride home on most evenings. So, given that brisk walking isn't exactly strenuous physical activity, and I've been only walking one way recently, I selected "Less than 30 minutes".

After submitting the form, I read over the result page, and took note of some of the portion and variety suggestions. It's not particularly complete, but coupled with the more extensive downloadable version and worksheets, it at least provides a rough compass for the dietarily impaired.
It got interesting when I was getting ready to close the browser and noticed the values that had been passed to the page as URL parameters. The options from the "My Pyramid Plan" box were submitted to the form as:

age=30
gender=male (gender, not sex - thus the source of my confusion)
activity=sed

My first instinct was to think: You can't possibly be telling my my activity level is "sedentary". I quickly went back and resubmit the form with the "30 to 60 minutes" and "More than 60 minutes" options, which yield a URL parameter of "activity=low" and "activity=active", respectively. Nope, they're definitely telling me that I lead a sedentary lifestyle. Remembering for a second that the point of this site is to encourage people to eat right and increase their daily activity, I'm a little disappointed that they would use that terminology. I'm so depressed, I think I'm going to drink a six-pack and eat a whole bag of potato chips.

garth[at]tunnel19[dot]com

Generated on: Tue Sep 7 19:44:17 PDT 2010