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33 Putting the 5 Food Groups on My Plate

eat. You shouldn’t just eat brown rice and chicken without the broccoli, for example. Then you aren’t eating any vegetables. HOW MUCH DO I EAT? You’re still missing one more important piece of information — how much of each food to eat! Lots of people tend to overeat. They eat more food than they need. When you eat too much all the time, you don’t feel very well. You also start to gain weight, which is danger- ous for your health. The U.S. government also has guides about how much food to eat. How much you need depends on who you are. Men tend to need to eat more than women. Teens and adults need to eat more than young kids. People who are more active need to eat more. The key to understanding how much you need to eat is calories. Calories are a measure of how much energy a food has. MAKE CONNECTIONS MyPlate also has information about exercise, the other important part of staying healthy. You won’t find exercise right on the MyPlate picture, but it goes hand-in-hand with eating healthy. Exercise keeps you strong and healthy. Moving makes your muscles, bones, and joints work right. You also feel a lot better if you move around. Try taking a run or playing a game, and see if you’re happier afterward. Young people should get an hour of exercise a day. You don’t have to exercise for an hour at a time, though. Exercising for 15 minutes four times a day adds up to an hour too. Exercise can be a lot of things! You just need to find the right exercise for you, one that fits with your life and is fun for you. Choose soccer, basketball, roller blading, skiing, running, swimming, volleyball, gymnastics, dance, yoga, or something else! There’s definitely an exercise out there for you. MAKE CONNECTIONS MyPlate is a tool used in the United States. Other countries use different tools to teach healthy eating. They all look a little different because people in different countries tend to have different diets. Japan uses a picture of a top to explain how to eat healthy. At the widest part of the top are grains and vegetables, which people are supposed to eat the most of. In the middle of the top is meat and fish. At the bottom is fruit and dairy, which people are supposed to eat daily, but in smaller quantities. Those are pretty much the same food groups as in the United States. But Japan recommends people eat different amounts of each group, because people in Japan traditionally eat a little differently from the way people in the United States do.