The food pyramid was designed to offer an easy-to-understand look at healthy eating, but for the average person it's too simplistic, vague, and sometimes way off. Here's how food pyramids work and ...

Taking into account this data and the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, we would suggest that the Irish Food Pyramid should be edited as soon as possible to convey the correct dietary message to the public.

The pyramid was revamped in 2005 to a more politically correct graphic that tried to communicate the proportion of each food group people should have in their diet.

Another problem with the food pyramid was the absence of any guidance on portion size for each food group. People likely overestimated what a correct portion of food looked like and over-ate.

Figure 1: The US Department of Agriculture Food Guide Pyramid, which is published under an open-access license by the US Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.