Nutrition Plate: Nutrition Ideas from CAPI and the White House
This spring, the White House unveiled and promoted the nutrition plate to replace the food pyramid—in an effort to promote health eating. The nutrition plate will not be new for CAPI as we have been using it since 2009. Two years ago, with a Communities of Color grant from General Mills, CAPI created a similar nutrition plate after holding focus groups with the Somali community whose members expressed a need to visualize what is needed for a healthy diet in an image of a plate versus a pyramid. Responding to what we had heard, CAPI collaborated with the University of Minnesota to create the Food Plate and have since been using it at our East African Food Shelf to raise awareness on healthy eating. CAPI is excited to see that ideas initiated by our communities have gained national appeal.