HumanaNatura Challenges New U.S. Government Nutritional Polices, Counters with “OurPlate” Healthy Eating Campaign

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) January 16, 2012 -- An important new nutritional health campaign called “OurPlate,” aimed at countering revised U.S. government nutritional guidelines, is being launched today by HumanaNatura.

As the name suggests, HumanaNatura’s campaign is intended to directly challenge and provide a healthier and more scientifically sound alternative to the U.S. government’s recently unveiled "MyPlate" dietary model.

“With the new OurPlate campaign, HumanaNatura intends to counter the U.S. government’s latest poorly construed guidelines for optimal eating,” said health science advocate and HumanaNatura founder Mark Lundegren, “In our view, the recent MyPlate guidelines are deeply flawed, selective in their use of available health science, and largely a re-packaging the now officially retired but long suspect food pyramid and earlier food group recommendations.”

In its NaturaLife blog post launching the new OurPlate campaign – available at http://humananatura.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/meet-ourplate-better-than-myplate/ – HumanaNatura calls out the outgoing U.S. government dietary model as ”inconsistent with our best science and growing research into human eating in nature and under artificial influences, heavily pressured and corrupted by agribusiness and other interests, and at best ineffectual at countering alarming dietary trends over at least two generations.”`

While acknowledging two changes in the U.S.’s new MyPlate recommendations are a step forward – halting its past promotion of sweets and excesses of fats – HumanaNatura’s OurPlate campaign materials underscore that the U.S. government’s newly revised five-group food model still carries forward fundamental errors and shortcomings from the retiring pyramid and earlier food group models.

MyPlate program shortfalls include three scientifically questionable and increasingly disputed dietary recommendations: 1) a diet rich in grains and cereals, 2) new increases in bean and legume consumption, and 3) continued promotion of dairy products. HumanaNatura views these provisions as part of a general failure by the U.S. government to consider growing scientific evidence that these traditional agricultural foods cause significant negative health impacts in humans and are less desirable than once thought.

To correct these and other critical flaws in the new MyPlate dietary model, HumanaNatura's OurPlate campaign begins by recommending a more substantial green dietary foundation, with at least half of food volume each day (post-infancy) in the form of raw vegetables, reflecting both our long-evolved human diet in nature and best available science for optimally healthy nutrition today. By contrast, the U.S. MyPlate model advocates half this amount and crucially contains no provision to ensure that vegetables are edible raw, thereby promoting unnatural, poorer quality, and reduced vegetable consumption overall.

Building on this primary foundation of raw vegetables, HumanaNatura’s OurPlate alternative then includes two additional food categories to complete its naturalized and science-intensive three-group food model for optimal nutrition. These two food categories are: 1) lean animal foods and raw nuts sufficient to ensure our natural protein needs, and 2) raw fruits to meet our remaining calorie needs. With its OurPlate model, HumanaNatura’s seeks to expose and correct essential flaws in the MyPlate and earlier food recommendations used in the United States and many other countries.

Anticipating questions about the science behind OurPlate, Lundegren said that HumanaNatura’s OurPlate model achieves its superior approach to daily eating through three important steps. “HumanaNatura begins with critical dietary findings from evolutionary science, ones that are frequently overlooked in traditionalist dietary regimes like MyPlate, which gives us a natural baseline or paradigm to improve upon,” Lundegren explained, “We then consider ongoing research into the positive and negative health effects of available modern foods. Finally, we seek to optimize our earlier natural diet using this science, by increasing and adjusting our mix of healthy foods and removing or reducing less healthy ones. Not surprising, the less healthy foods that have been removed by HumanaNatura are mostly unnatural or more recently introduced foods – foods we are not genetically adapted for, in other words.”

“The foods that have been removed from our recommended OurPlate model obviously include junk and processed foods we simply would not find in nature, but they also include familiar agricultural foods like grains, beans, and dairy products.” Lundegren added, “In the HumanaNatura approach, we replace these less desirable foods with more natural and scientifically healthier ones consistent with our long eating patterns in nature and with our best nutritional science. With HumanaNatura and OurPlate, the focus is clear: raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts, with enough lean animal foods to meet our natural protein and other non-plant nutrient needs, such as vitamin B12.”

HumanaNatura describes OurPlate as creating a far simpler, sounder, and more natural approach for optimal daily and lifelong eating than MyPlate. The more optimal OurPlate approach accounts for a fuller range of available science regarding our natural human health, and assimilates critical health lessons from pre-agricultural life patterns. OurPlate is also notably unadulterated by the unhealthy demands and inadequately examined positions of commercial and traditional interests that have dominated U.S nutritional policy for decades. And OurPlate creates a gateway to other important natural health lessons and science-based techniques to increase our modern fitness and well-being, beyond ensuring a naturally healthy dietary regime.

Although HumanaNatura’s OurPlate campaign is directed at countering the U.S. government’s recent MyPlate dietary proposals, HumanaNatura highlights in its campaign materials that the OurPlate nutritional health campaign is applicable globally and intended to slow and reverse adoption of U.S. nutritional guidelines in other countries as well. HumanaNatura intends to use its OurPlate campaign to promote increased health science awareness and advocacy more generally, with the aim of improving nutritional and other health-related choices and policies, wherever and whenever possible.

As part of its OurPlate campaign launch, and in keeping with HumanaNatura’s global health science education and advocacy mission, HumanaNatura today called on scientists and health institutes involved in nutritional and related fields of research from around the world to support its new OurPlate campaign and join in demanding improvements in the latest U.S. dietary guidelines.

About HumanaNatura

HumanaNatura is a global non-profit educational and advocacy organization based in the United States. HumanaNatura’s mission is to use modern science to promote progressive new health awareness and quality of life in individuals and communities around the world. HumanaNatura supports a worldwide network of community-based health advocates who use and promote HumanaNatura and its four-part natural health system.

Contact
HumanaNatura encourages comments, questions, press inquiries, and professional feedback on its new OurPlate campaign and overall natural health system via its website at www.Humananatura.org or its NaturaLife blog at www.humananatura.wordpress.com.

Mark Lundegren, Founder
HumanaNatura, Inc.
contactus@humananatura.org

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