When I’m not being me, I play the role of a health literacy educator. My job is to take the information we have on biology, diseases, and the body and to make it understandable for the general population — a translator of sorts, if you will.

So when tooday the government announced its retooled food pyramid, I was very excited. The panel that was convened to help rework the food guidelines has been notoriously prickly about this topic, and factions within the group had a hard time agreeing on how to rework the pyramid or whether to have a pyramid at all, leaving the panel several years over its original deadline for getting revised guidelines out. The only thing everyone could agree on was that people were getting fatter and something needed to change.

So they’ve changed it all right. They kept the pyramid, but they’ve now given us twelve of them.

I would give you more details about these pyramids, except that every journalist in America is currently flooding the USDA’s web site. At this point, I feel it would be faster for me to fly to Egypt and take a tour if I want to see 12 pyramids.

So check back with me later and I’ll give you more information.