This term paper is not difficult and you might even find that it’s a lot of fun. The focus is on you and your diet. Please note – there are no good diets or bad diets. For this paper, you are asked to give detailed comparisons between diets. That’s all. Also, I encourage you to give details – do NOT be vague. Do not state that you don’t really eat veggies, except on your burger, or that you ate a little more grains than what My Plate recommends, for example. State that My Plate recommends 1 cup of grains and you ate 2 cups.

Follow the requirements for each section of the paper.

Your term paper will includes these sections:

1) Describe My Diet: Provide a detailed food log of all the foods you eat during a 7 day period. Create this in a text file, since you will be copying it into an answerbox. Include snacks, meals, whatever. Record the times you ate, the specific foods you ate (ex. breakfast: coffee with sugar, a fruit smoothie with plain yogurt, blueberries and banana) and the portions/serving sizes. Lunch: 1 Ham sandwich (3 oz) with 2 slices of wheat bread, mustard, tomatoes and lettuce (total ½ cup veggies) and a diet coke) Dinner: 4 Oz of barbecued chicken, 2 cups of rice, one cup of broccoli and a medium glass of red wine.

2) Describe My Plate: Describe the foods in each category listed in My Plate, the USDA’s recommended diet for Americans today (choosemyplate.gov).
What are the basic food groups? What foods are included in each food group? (Example –What’s in the protein category?) Be sure to include salt, sugar, oils etc.
What are the portion/sizes for the food groups? (does My Plate recommend eating more of one food category vs. another?)

3) Compare My Diet to My plate: Compare your diet to My Plate. Analyze your diet, based on your food log. Which foods, from which food groups, do you typically eat and how does this compare with My Plate? Protein? (what kind?), Veggies? (what kind?). What are your portions/serving sizes compared to those recommended in My Plate? Are there specific food groups that you don’t include in your own diet? If there are, why don’t you include these foods or food groups?

4) Describe the Pre-agricultural Diet: Read about the pre-agricultural diet discussed in your textbook (Chapter 16) and lecture notes (Biocultural Evolution and Diet). (This is NOT the Paleo Diet)
What were the basic food groups? What foods would have been included in each group? Be sure to include salt, sugar, oils etc. What were the portion/sizes for the food groups (you’ll have to estimate this)?

5) Compare the Pre-agricultural Diet to My Plate: Compare what we know about the pre-agricultural diet to My Plate. How has the human diet changed since the domestication of plants and animals around 10,000 years ago?
Compare food groups – which food groups or foods are the same? Which are different?
How do the portions/serving sizes recommended in My Plate compare to those that were in the pre-ag diet?

6) Compare the Pre-Agricultural Diet to My Diet: Compare your diet to the pre-agricultural diet. How does your diet mimic, or differ from, this diet?
Compare food groups in your diet to the pre-ag diet. Which food groups or foods are the same? Which are different?
How do the portions/serving sizes in your diet compare to those that were in the pre-ag diet?

The point of all of this is to compare food groups and portions. This will, hopefully, allow you to see what you eat, what the USDA recommends that you eat, and what humankind, for most of its history, ate. Again, begin with a food log, assessing, at a high level, how much you ate of different food groups (ex. 2 cups of veggies). Then, take a look at My Plate, which is grouped into food groups with recommended portions (ex. recommended 3 cups of veggies). Then compare like food groups and portions (eating 2 cups of veggies. recommended 3 cups of veggies). Add in the preag diet with an estimate of food groups and portions (ex. veggies – 5 cups). Now you can go back and compare the preag diet to My Plate (3 cups of veggies vs. 5) and the preag diet to your diet (2 cups of veggies vs. 5). As you are doing this, you can analyze what you’ve discovered about your diet, what the USDA says you should be eating, and what Homo sapiens, traditionally, ate.

You can either write your paper in traditional term paper style, or you can split the paper into sections, following the sections listed here.

*You can just make up random food for the this assignment