11 ms·

As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling / recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young. Cerea

by arzig 3y ago

As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling / recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young. Cereals were basically the best thing to eat because how else where you going to fill the foundation of the pyramid with your 11 (exact number is fuzzy) recommended servings of grains per day. The pyramid was shown proudly on all the boxes. Meanwhile protein and fats were to be minimized. It may not be causal, but it certainly didn’t help the obesity problem in this country that the government explicitly recommended everyone fill up in foods that aren’t actually filling.

donatj 3y ago
Did you actually base what you ate on the food pyramid? I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.
- wincy 3y ago
  We did because the schools followed the food pyramid. So they pushed foods on us that were low fat and high carb (like the ‘healthy’ chocolate skim milk, and no whole milk). Margarine instead of butter. Government food recommendations are HUGE deal to kids in public schools in the United States.
  - donatj 3y ago
    Ah, that is a good point. I was a poor sack lunch kid so I never considered that aspect. Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.
    - acdha 3y ago
      It very much depends on where you live. Many Republicans were livid about Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch effort and that inspired unnecessary rancor over what shouldn’t be controversial. The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.
      - jtdev 3y ago
        [dead]
    - andrepd 3y ago
      It's so weird to me that free school lunches for children are something that is not 100% immediately obvious and uncontroversial and beyond any discussion. Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).
  - j-a-a-p 3y ago
    I can't imagine eating high carb and margarine is a problem for children. They burn anything they swallow especially if you stick to decent carbs like bread or rice. It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).
    - vintermann 3y ago
      Until recently, margarine was high in trans fats, which are especially unhealthy.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    Margarine and butter both sort under "fat" in old dietary guidelines. The reason schools (or anyone) preferred the former was because of cost. I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.
- unlikelytomato 3y ago
  Directly and indirectly. Buying decisions from parents was influenced. Advertising influenced people. School lunches. What parents would feed other kids after activities. Habits of people "never giving it a second thought" were still being shaped by these forces. Even if someone only thinks about it a fraction of the time, it moves the needle. If my mom ate 10% more processed carbs than her parents and passed those habits to me, I was impacted. Rinse Repeat for 60 years.
- matthewtse 3y ago
  > I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. Actually, to a shocking degree, yes. I grew up in an immigrant family, so my parents were far too busy working to do non-mainstream research on diet. I grew up eating 2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time. If your parents aren't well-off enough to do dedicated research into the optimal diet for their children (which describes most of American parents), then you'll follow the advertised government guidelines.
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    As diets go, meat, rice and vegetables isn’t that bad. Cereal… not so great.
    - fundad 3y ago
      Agreed, the thing is my kids can afford the calories that I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Starch has energy, habits about balance are important too.
    - okaram 3y ago
      Rice is s cereal. The main problem is the processing, not the underlying grain ;)
      - rolph 3y ago
        > processing < rice crispies, and puffed rice in the 5 gallon bag [next to the puffed wheat] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice
      - jonplackett 3y ago
        Yeah m, thought th ‘breakfast’ part of cereal was a given since that’s what we’re discussing.
  - 3y ago
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  I really doubt if people actually ate the food guide pyramid they would be overweight. The problem is they still lace everything with that top part of fats, oils, and sweets. Cheetos are not the base of the pyramid. I don’t know anyone that is obese from eating whole grain breads, rice, and pasta. It’s not calorie dense until you start adding all the extras. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-... > he or she also consumes 36 pounds of cooking oils – more than three times as much as in the early 1970s. > Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970.
- rubyfan 3y ago
  If you ate lunch served by a public school then your diet was impacted by the food pyramid.
- veidr 3y ago
  Well-meaning adults based what they gave kids on the food pyramid.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    If that were true, and the food pyramid was this disaster, you'd expect the kids of the well-educated middle class to be fatter and the kids of parentally neglected kids to be thinner. If it's not like that, probably other factors were a lot more important than the food pyramid.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  It definitely contributed to the overall feeling or notion of what was considered healthy by non-nutritionists.
- tzs 3y ago
  > I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. And even if a huge number of Americans did robotically follow it that would not explain the obesity epidemic, because the obesity epidemic is worldwide.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    The obesity epidemic varies widely by county. But many countries that had a similar food pyramid are relatively thin, and some countries that are very obese never had one, so you're right that it's a poor explanation
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  I have to measure sugar level everyday, so I have rapid numerical feedback on my eating habits, that helps to nudge me to healthier choices.
the_gastropod 3y ago
For as much criticism as the food pyramid gets these days, you’d think today’s diet recommendations would be dramatically different. But they’re not. The food pyramid is still very close to the diets most dieticians in most developed countries recommend. There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it. Most breakfast cereals have tons of sugars added. The top part of the food pyramid—the smallest area—is for foods with added sugars. The food pyramid never justified eating a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, though that seems to basically be what people accuse it of.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  The bottom layer was literally called the "Bread, Cereal, Rice, & Pasta Group" and featured a picture of a bowl of processed breakfast cereal, among other things. The top layer was "Fats, Oils, & Sweets" and had some white and yellow spots. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be justifying that, but as an infographic that's what it was suggesting.
  - bnralt 3y ago
    Exactly this. "Sweets" for most people meant deserts You can see a picture of the food pyramid the USDA used to use here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition) Telling people they should be having a lot of cereal and showing them a bowl of cereal (along with saltine crackers) is going to lead them to believe that's healthy. Especially in the 90's when "cereal" for almost everyone meant highly processed breakfast cereals with a lot of added sugars, and there was little awareness with how much sugar was being added to everything. Telling people to eat a lot of whole grains is entirely different from telling people to eat a lot of, quote: "bread, cereal, rice and pasta."
- vintermann 3y ago
  > There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it. I think it's because 1. Diet fads can be extremely lucrative 2. Stuff you put into your body touches on topics of purity and cleanliness, which have always been a big deal to us. Many religions have strong opinions on it, but it probably predates them. 3. Large interest groups do in fact organize to push their products as healthy, or at least less unhealthy. So there is some "conspiracy", both for and against carbs (and protein, and whatever).
boxed 3y ago
Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad, and they get what they expect. In Europe we get very angry when the government is corrupt and bad. Maybe instead of trying to spread your meme of "government always bad", you try to take on the European meme of "government needs to be good or everything goes to hell"?
- beefychops 3y ago
  [flagged]
- adriand 3y ago
  America’s government - as in, the civil service - is neither corrupt nor bad. It is a very well-run country! You need only visit America to witness how excellent it is in many ways. There is a reason that, despite its faults, America is still the most innovative and economically powerful country in the world. In terms of Europe, the level of corruption and competence seems to be highly variable depending on the country. So again it seems misplaced to make a broad assertion like the one you made.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    It's well-run in some aspects and disastrous in others. The fact that the US is an economic powerhouse is due to other things, not the quality of its federal and local government.
    - bohadi 3y ago
      [dead]
    - oblio 3y ago
      Tons of natural resources and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity, these immigrants serving as the bedrock that instilled the current US culture. Before anyone tries anything funny I'm neither American, nor Western European, nor Protestant.
conductr 3y ago
It’s not the government’s fault when they said cereal, they meant healthy oats and grains but instead people bought fruity pebbles. I remember being a kid in the 80s and it was very much understood that the healthy cereal was the plain cheerios and unsweetened corn flakes and stuff that nobody (especially kids) wanted to eat-or we’d just add a ton of sugar to it at home. If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret/ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.
- devmor 3y ago
  The food pyramid was nonsense, regardless of interpretation. No one needs to eat that much grain - and did you forget that it explicitly listed dairy as a nutritional requirement?
  - conductr 3y ago
    I’m not arguing for the pyramid by any means or saying that it wasn’t flawed. My critique is that instead of poking wholes in it, debating if eggs are or are not healthy and such, we really just normalized massive portions and fried/fast food/soft drinks/sugar in everything/etc. Which completely misses the spirit of what the pyramid was even aspiring to be. We didn’t even consider the pyramid when we made our food choices. We just allowed our gluttony to lead us where it may. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. We knew very well we were making poor choices along the way, but gave in to our desires. (Using “we” as collective US generalization, not trying to speak about anyone specifically, I’m sure someone here has a counterpoint but the obesity stats represent us collectively )
    - devmor 3y ago
      I don’t disagree but I do wonder how much the food pyramid played into developing those habits. Think of all the schools and parents trying to follow it and conditioning their children into eating all that grain and dairy every day. I don’t think it’s solely responsible but I don’t think its effects were negligible.
lukas099 3y ago
The current U.S. dietary guidelines for americans are quite sound but I am the only person I know who listens to them.
standardUser 3y ago
Honestly, anything is better than the complete lack of useful labelling we're stuck with in the US. I agree the approach of some counties is heavy-handed and too opinionated, but I'd rather that than the corporate-approved nonsense we print on our food.
orochimaaru 3y ago
The pyramid and the new myplate are created by the USDA. I’m not sure why the department of agriculture is providing nutrition information. So I do share in your skepticism. I think this should be CDC/NIH owned. https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-12/ABriefHistoryOfUSDAFoodGuides.pdf https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-1...
mixmastamyk 3y ago
“Have a 3-2-4-4 day.” Grains were at the end with a four, not eleven. ;-)

by arzig 3y ago

donatj 3y ago

Did you actually base what you ate on the food pyramid? I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.

wincy 3y ago
We did because the schools followed the food pyramid. So they pushed foods on us that were low fat and high carb (like the ‘healthy’ chocolate skim milk, and no whole milk). Margarine instead of butter. Government food recommendations are HUGE deal to kids in public schools in the United States.
- donatj 3y ago
  Ah, that is a good point. I was a poor sack lunch kid so I never considered that aspect. Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It very much depends on where you live. Many Republicans were livid about Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch effort and that inspired unnecessary rancor over what shouldn’t be controversial. The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.
    - jtdev 3y ago
      [dead]
  - andrepd 3y ago
    It's so weird to me that free school lunches for children are something that is not 100% immediately obvious and uncontroversial and beyond any discussion. Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).
- j-a-a-p 3y ago
  I can't imagine eating high carb and margarine is a problem for children. They burn anything they swallow especially if you stick to decent carbs like bread or rice. It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).
  - vintermann 3y ago
    Until recently, margarine was high in trans fats, which are especially unhealthy.
- vintermann 3y ago
  Margarine and butter both sort under "fat" in old dietary guidelines. The reason schools (or anyone) preferred the former was because of cost. I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.
unlikelytomato 3y ago
Directly and indirectly. Buying decisions from parents was influenced. Advertising influenced people. School lunches. What parents would feed other kids after activities. Habits of people "never giving it a second thought" were still being shaped by these forces. Even if someone only thinks about it a fraction of the time, it moves the needle. If my mom ate 10% more processed carbs than her parents and passed those habits to me, I was impacted. Rinse Repeat for 60 years.
matthewtse 3y ago
> I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. Actually, to a shocking degree, yes. I grew up in an immigrant family, so my parents were far too busy working to do non-mainstream research on diet. I grew up eating 2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time. If your parents aren't well-off enough to do dedicated research into the optimal diet for their children (which describes most of American parents), then you'll follow the advertised government guidelines.
- jonplackett 3y ago
  As diets go, meat, rice and vegetables isn’t that bad. Cereal… not so great.
  - fundad 3y ago
    Agreed, the thing is my kids can afford the calories that I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Starch has energy, habits about balance are important too.
  - okaram 3y ago
    Rice is s cereal. The main problem is the processing, not the underlying grain ;)
    - rolph 3y ago
      > processing < rice crispies, and puffed rice in the 5 gallon bag [next to the puffed wheat] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice
    - jonplackett 3y ago
      Yeah m, thought th ‘breakfast’ part of cereal was a given since that’s what we’re discussing.
- 3y ago
Mistletoe 3y ago
I really doubt if people actually ate the food guide pyramid they would be overweight. The problem is they still lace everything with that top part of fats, oils, and sweets. Cheetos are not the base of the pyramid. I don’t know anyone that is obese from eating whole grain breads, rice, and pasta. It’s not calorie dense until you start adding all the extras. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-... > he or she also consumes 36 pounds of cooking oils – more than three times as much as in the early 1970s. > Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970.
rubyfan 3y ago
If you ate lunch served by a public school then your diet was impacted by the food pyramid.
veidr 3y ago
Well-meaning adults based what they gave kids on the food pyramid.
- vintermann 3y ago
  If that were true, and the food pyramid was this disaster, you'd expect the kids of the well-educated middle class to be fatter and the kids of parentally neglected kids to be thinner. If it's not like that, probably other factors were a lot more important than the food pyramid.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
It definitely contributed to the overall feeling or notion of what was considered healthy by non-nutritionists.
tzs 3y ago
> I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat. And even if a huge number of Americans did robotically follow it that would not explain the obesity epidemic, because the obesity epidemic is worldwide.
- vintermann 3y ago
  The obesity epidemic varies widely by county. But many countries that had a similar food pyramid are relatively thin, and some countries that are very obese never had one, so you're right that it's a poor explanation
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
I have to measure sugar level everyday, so I have rapid numerical feedback on my eating habits, that helps to nudge me to healthier choices.

the_gastropod 3y ago

For as much criticism as the food pyramid gets these days, you’d think today’s diet recommendations would be dramatically different. But they’re not. The food pyramid is still very close to the diets most dieticians in most developed countries recommend. There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it. Most breakfast cereals have tons of sugars added. The top part of the food pyramid—the smallest area—is for foods with added sugars. The food pyramid never justified eating a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, though that seems to basically be what people accuse it of.

Tao3300 3y ago
The bottom layer was literally called the "Bread, Cereal, Rice, & Pasta Group" and featured a picture of a bowl of processed breakfast cereal, among other things. The top layer was "Fats, Oils, & Sweets" and had some white and yellow spots. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be justifying that, but as an infographic that's what it was suggesting.
- bnralt 3y ago
  Exactly this. "Sweets" for most people meant deserts You can see a picture of the food pyramid the USDA used to use here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition) Telling people they should be having a lot of cereal and showing them a bowl of cereal (along with saltine crackers) is going to lead them to believe that's healthy. Especially in the 90's when "cereal" for almost everyone meant highly processed breakfast cereals with a lot of added sugars, and there was little awareness with how much sugar was being added to everything. Telling people to eat a lot of whole grains is entirely different from telling people to eat a lot of, quote: "bread, cereal, rice and pasta."
vintermann 3y ago
> There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it. I think it's because 1. Diet fads can be extremely lucrative 2. Stuff you put into your body touches on topics of purity and cleanliness, which have always been a big deal to us. Many religions have strong opinions on it, but it probably predates them. 3. Large interest groups do in fact organize to push their products as healthy, or at least less unhealthy. So there is some "conspiracy", both for and against carbs (and protein, and whatever).

boxed 3y ago

Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad, and they get what they expect. In Europe we get very angry when the government is corrupt and bad. Maybe instead of trying to spread your meme of "government always bad", you try to take on the European meme of "government needs to be good or everything goes to hell"?

beefychops 3y ago
[flagged]
adriand 3y ago
America’s government - as in, the civil service - is neither corrupt nor bad. It is a very well-run country! You need only visit America to witness how excellent it is in many ways. There is a reason that, despite its faults, America is still the most innovative and economically powerful country in the world. In terms of Europe, the level of corruption and competence seems to be highly variable depending on the country. So again it seems misplaced to make a broad assertion like the one you made.
- andrepd 3y ago
  It's well-run in some aspects and disastrous in others. The fact that the US is an economic powerhouse is due to other things, not the quality of its federal and local government.
  - bohadi 3y ago
    [dead]
  - oblio 3y ago
    Tons of natural resources and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity, these immigrants serving as the bedrock that instilled the current US culture. Before anyone tries anything funny I'm neither American, nor Western European, nor Protestant.

conductr 3y ago

It’s not the government’s fault when they said cereal, they meant healthy oats and grains but instead people bought fruity pebbles. I remember being a kid in the 80s and it was very much understood that the healthy cereal was the plain cheerios and unsweetened corn flakes and stuff that nobody (especially kids) wanted to eat-or we’d just add a ton of sugar to it at home. If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret/ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.

devmor 3y ago
The food pyramid was nonsense, regardless of interpretation. No one needs to eat that much grain - and did you forget that it explicitly listed dairy as a nutritional requirement?
- conductr 3y ago
  I’m not arguing for the pyramid by any means or saying that it wasn’t flawed. My critique is that instead of poking wholes in it, debating if eggs are or are not healthy and such, we really just normalized massive portions and fried/fast food/soft drinks/sugar in everything/etc. Which completely misses the spirit of what the pyramid was even aspiring to be. We didn’t even consider the pyramid when we made our food choices. We just allowed our gluttony to lead us where it may. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. We knew very well we were making poor choices along the way, but gave in to our desires. (Using “we” as collective US generalization, not trying to speak about anyone specifically, I’m sure someone here has a counterpoint but the obesity stats represent us collectively )
  - devmor 3y ago
    I don’t disagree but I do wonder how much the food pyramid played into developing those habits. Think of all the schools and parents trying to follow it and conditioning their children into eating all that grain and dairy every day. I don’t think it’s solely responsible but I don’t think its effects were negligible.

lukas099 3y ago

The current U.S. dietary guidelines for americans are quite sound but I am the only person I know who listens to them.

standardUser 3y ago

Honestly, anything is better than the complete lack of useful labelling we're stuck with in the US. I agree the approach of some counties is heavy-handed and too opinionated, but I'd rather that than the corporate-approved nonsense we print on our food.

orochimaaru 3y ago

The pyramid and the new myplate are created by the USDA. I’m not sure why the department of agriculture is providing nutrition information. So I do share in your skepticism. I think this should be CDC/NIH owned. https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-12/ABriefHistoryOfUSDAFoodGuides.pdf https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-1...

mixmastamyk 3y ago

“Have a 3-2-4-4 day.” Grains were at the end with a four, not eleven. ;-)