5 ms·

Is anyone having flashbacks to when fat was vilified and the food pyramid put bread at the bottom?

by gustavus 3y ago

chmod600 3y ago
Bread doesn't have fructose, right?
- Simulacra 3y ago
  Most bread sold in the grocery store has high fructose corn syrup
  - DC-3 3y ago
    (in the USA)
  - graton 3y ago
    Do you have any data to back that assertion? In my limited searching I found an article that says the opposite, but they also don't provide any data[1] [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/secrets-of-store-bought-bread-youll-wish-you-knew-sooner/ar-AA1ivtYd https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/secrets-of-store-...
    - Simulacra 3y ago
      #10. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-with-high-fructose-corn-syrup#10.-Bread-and-crackers https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-with-high-fructos... It would be nice if there was a database of food labels.
      - InSteady 3y ago
        You can find this info on https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ The search function and UI is terrible, though. There used to be a website self.nutritiondata.com that was amazing. Full calorie, carb, fat, and nutrient profiles on all manner of whole foods, plus lots of branded processed food labels as well. Apparently they had to take it all down because it was out of date. They got all of their info form the USDA link above, so the data still exists and there are other web apps out there that organize it for you, but they all pale in comparison to the old self.nutritiondata, sadly.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - devmor 3y ago
    The packaged, pre-sliced stuff from brands, yeah. Most grocery stores also have a bakery though, and its far less common there.
  - KMag 3y ago
    Sucrose is broken down in the stomach (by the low pH) and small intestine (by sucrase) into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose. The most common high fructose corn syrups are (to a first-order approximation, after dehydration) 58/42 and 45/55 mixtures of glucose and fructose. I'm not saying HFCS is good, but a sucrose-sweetened bread is likely just as bad for you as an HFCS sweetened bread, if the mass of sweetener is the same. Edit: When I was at Google, I remember some employees complaining that the only free sodas were either HFCS-sweetened or artificially-sweetened. So, we later got some agave-sweetened free sodas. The things is agave nectar is 56% fructose. The most common HFCS grades are 42% and 55% fructose. Maybe agave nectar is maybe marginally more healthy, but really... if you're going to get that worked up, you're much better off training yourself to be content without the free soda. Drink soda, or not, but please don't fool yourself into thinking switching from 55% fructose to 56% fructose is a health intervention. Maybe people are afraid of trace residues from the HFCS processing, but all evidence suggests that the fructose is orders of magnitude more harmful than any ingested byproducts of the HFCS manufacturing process.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
macinjosh 3y ago
Yeah, I could never reconcile the concept of a "balanced" diet and the idea that a certain, easy to produce, category of food should be the majority of calories. It was clearly a nudge on the exploding post-war populations to eat foods that are good for business and not necessarily good for health. An acre of corn or wheat makes whole lot more than that same acre being used for leafy greens or grass-fed proteins and fats (i.e. livestock)
cmiller1 3y ago
Modern dietary guidelines still put breads at the bottom, the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid is a really good version of the "pyramid infographic" style of nutritional guidance. There is some evidence the old US food pyramid guideline of 5-11 servings of grains were influenced by lobbying from the food industry, however by my calculations 5-11 servings of grains is pretty much necessary if you follow the AHA's optimal health guidelines of 300 minutes of cardio per week. If you look into the history of how the US food pyramid got made the biggest influence of industry lobbyists were on the meat and dairy recommendations, changing "no more than 2-3 servings" to "2-3 servings a day" and removing red meat from the "sparingly" peak at the top of the pyramid.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
WorldMaker 3y ago
This was a problem well before the "Food Pyramid": Food Calories and the Standard Calorie Model were invented by the "scientists" at the Sanitarium at Battle Creek (aka "Wellville") who were also "coincidentally" the founders of Kellogg's and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) based on some weird religious beliefs that grains were God's true foods. Food Calories were invented to sell more cereals, crackers, and cookies.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Calorie is a unit of energy equivalent to the heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C (now often defined as equal to 4.1868 joules). How was that invented to sell oreos?
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    That's the definition of "little-c" calorie, not food Calorie. Food Calorie still claims a relationship to "little-c" calorie but its scale is in a further different magnitude and some of the numbers in its standard model can't be replicated so are just taken as given constants. But also the SI system dropped little-c calorie for Joules in part to shake up the over-reliance in some of the sciences of old bad Phlogiston theories, that "heat energy" is somehow usefully more indicative of energy density. (The physics formula for energy density of mass is the well known E=mc^2, nothing to do with heat.) Over-focusing on "heat energy" and a model that assumes the human body is an ideal spherical furnace ignores most, if not all, nuance in macronutrients and metabolism pathways, and biases in favor of foods that aren't as easy to set on fire (such as grains over fats). (Not to mention the very dark flipside of "exercise calories" and that if you are optimizing the human body's output as an ideal spherical furnace you are optimizing for states such as "fever" and "stroke".)
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  Bit of a side note on grains being "God's true food" - I read a book about the formation of the earliest states (Against the Grain by James C. Scott) where the author argues basically that grains prevailed as states developed because of their suitability as a currency for taxation compared to other staples like potatoes/root vegetables. Grains are usually harvested all at once at predictable times (so harder to lie to tax collectors), have a relatively long shelf life, and are easy to weigh/standardize. I believe they're also more laborious to grow which might benefit a fledgling state trying to maintain control over its subjects. The author has a noted anarchist bent, but definitely an interesting read and that take is kind of a funny parallel with the "God's true food" rhetoric.

Is anyone having flashbacks to when fat was vilified and the food pyramid put bread at the bottom?

chmod600 3y ago

Bread doesn't have fructose, right?

Simulacra 3y ago
Most bread sold in the grocery store has high fructose corn syrup
- DC-3 3y ago
  (in the USA)
- graton 3y ago
  Do you have any data to back that assertion? In my limited searching I found an article that says the opposite, but they also don't provide any data[1] [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/secrets-of-store-bought-bread-youll-wish-you-knew-sooner/ar-AA1ivtYd https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/secrets-of-store-...
  - Simulacra 3y ago
    #10. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-with-high-fructose-corn-syrup#10.-Bread-and-crackers https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-with-high-fructos... It would be nice if there was a database of food labels.
    - InSteady 3y ago
      You can find this info on https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ The search function and UI is terrible, though. There used to be a website self.nutritiondata.com that was amazing. Full calorie, carb, fat, and nutrient profiles on all manner of whole foods, plus lots of branded processed food labels as well. Apparently they had to take it all down because it was out of date. They got all of their info form the USDA link above, so the data still exists and there are other web apps out there that organize it for you, but they all pale in comparison to the old self.nutritiondata, sadly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- devmor 3y ago
  The packaged, pre-sliced stuff from brands, yeah. Most grocery stores also have a bakery though, and its far less common there.
- KMag 3y ago
  Sucrose is broken down in the stomach (by the low pH) and small intestine (by sucrase) into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose. The most common high fructose corn syrups are (to a first-order approximation, after dehydration) 58/42 and 45/55 mixtures of glucose and fructose. I'm not saying HFCS is good, but a sucrose-sweetened bread is likely just as bad for you as an HFCS sweetened bread, if the mass of sweetener is the same. Edit: When I was at Google, I remember some employees complaining that the only free sodas were either HFCS-sweetened or artificially-sweetened. So, we later got some agave-sweetened free sodas. The things is agave nectar is 56% fructose. The most common HFCS grades are 42% and 55% fructose. Maybe agave nectar is maybe marginally more healthy, but really... if you're going to get that worked up, you're much better off training yourself to be content without the free soda. Drink soda, or not, but please don't fool yourself into thinking switching from 55% fructose to 56% fructose is a health intervention. Maybe people are afraid of trace residues from the HFCS processing, but all evidence suggests that the fructose is orders of magnitude more harmful than any ingested byproducts of the HFCS manufacturing process.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

macinjosh 3y ago

Yeah, I could never reconcile the concept of a "balanced" diet and the idea that a certain, easy to produce, category of food should be the majority of calories. It was clearly a nudge on the exploding post-war populations to eat foods that are good for business and not necessarily good for health. An acre of corn or wheat makes whole lot more than that same acre being used for leafy greens or grass-fed proteins and fats (i.e. livestock)

cmiller1 3y ago

Modern dietary guidelines still put breads at the bottom, the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid is a really good version of the "pyramid infographic" style of nutritional guidance. There is some evidence the old US food pyramid guideline of 5-11 servings of grains were influenced by lobbying from the food industry, however by my calculations 5-11 servings of grains is pretty much necessary if you follow the AHA's optimal health guidelines of 300 minutes of cardio per week. If you look into the history of how the US food pyramid got made the biggest influence of industry lobbyists were on the meat and dairy recommendations, changing "no more than 2-3 servings" to "2-3 servings a day" and removing red meat from the "sparingly" peak at the top of the pyramid.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

WorldMaker 3y ago

This was a problem well before the "Food Pyramid": Food Calories and the Standard Calorie Model were invented by the "scientists" at the Sanitarium at Battle Creek (aka "Wellville") who were also "coincidentally" the founders of Kellogg's and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) based on some weird religious beliefs that grains were God's true foods. Food Calories were invented to sell more cereals, crackers, and cookies.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
Calorie is a unit of energy equivalent to the heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C (now often defined as equal to 4.1868 joules). How was that invented to sell oreos?
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  That's the definition of "little-c" calorie, not food Calorie. Food Calorie still claims a relationship to "little-c" calorie but its scale is in a further different magnitude and some of the numbers in its standard model can't be replicated so are just taken as given constants. But also the SI system dropped little-c calorie for Joules in part to shake up the over-reliance in some of the sciences of old bad Phlogiston theories, that "heat energy" is somehow usefully more indicative of energy density. (The physics formula for energy density of mass is the well known E=mc^2, nothing to do with heat.) Over-focusing on "heat energy" and a model that assumes the human body is an ideal spherical furnace ignores most, if not all, nuance in macronutrients and metabolism pathways, and biases in favor of foods that aren't as easy to set on fire (such as grains over fats). (Not to mention the very dark flipside of "exercise calories" and that if you are optimizing the human body's output as an ideal spherical furnace you are optimizing for states such as "fever" and "stroke".)
tommychillfiger 3y ago
Bit of a side note on grains being "God's true food" - I read a book about the formation of the earliest states (Against the Grain by James C. Scott) where the author argues basically that grains prevailed as states developed because of their suitability as a currency for taxation compared to other staples like potatoes/root vegetables. Grains are usually harvested all at once at predictable times (so harder to lie to tax collectors), have a relatively long shelf life, and are easy to weigh/standardize. I believe they're also more laborious to grow which might benefit a fledgling state trying to maintain control over its subjects. The author has a noted anarchist bent, but definitely an interesting read and that take is kind of a funny parallel with the "God's true food" rhetoric.