5 ms·

Guiding principles: How US dietary guidelines contribute to obesity

35 points by bilsbie 2y ago

acjohnson55 2y ago
Perhaps we'll look back at the deterioration of the American diet as the greatest self-inflicted error of the past 50 years. But it wasn't an accident. The dietary guidelines have been heavily influenced by agribusiness. This been catastrophic for health outcomes and quality of life. There's way more to the story than dietary guidelines, and there isn't complete consensus on what caused the onset of the obesity epidemic, but the dietary guidelines are at the very least an embarrassing artifact of the problem.
- dopylitty 2y ago
  Whether the correlated problems are the dietary guidelines, microplastic tainted junk food, the terrible healthcare system, or communities designed to rely entirely on cars for transportation the root cause is the way the economic and governmental systems in the US are set up to allow for-profit enterprises to control our lives. The only real fix is to take back control from the companies and remake society into one where health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit.
  - Incipient 2y ago
    >health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit. Until the measure of success and quality of a society is measured by health and wellbeing, that won't happen. A society is measured, first and foremost, by GDP, then first and foremost that society will prioritise profits (as a proxy for GDP).
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Zooming out more, it an example of how the regressive nature of the US Senate fuels a variety of ills, both benign/passive and evil. It’s a mockery of “one man, one vote” principles that improved state governance. We spend billions and create unaccountable misery and suffering because a few states with more sheep than people benefit to the tune of probably less than a billion dollars annually.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  The greatest self-inflicted error was the use of fossil fuels to warm the climate, not a horrible diet. Although, I suppose both come from a similar point of view: the manipulation of our instincts and a lack of a natural philosophy to respect life. In one case, it is indiviudual life, and in another, it is all life put together.
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    They said, while comfortably browsing HN and sipping their coffee
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      A rather insipid criticism. Of course, I will try and use every communications medium I can find to say what I think. I would MUCH rather have the world WITHOUT HN, without the internet, and without computers even, if it meant that the extinction rate were back to background. In fact, I would be absolutely overjoyed if I didn't have to use a computer at all (I use one for work and for spreading my ideas.) But here's something: if computers and advanced technology did not exist, then I would have NO reason to write about what I write about. And I don't drink coffee.
      - slothtrop 2y ago
        If you want to live without computers, you can. You've made your value judgement.
        vouaobrasil 2y ago
        Not really, not if I want to obtain food or at least buy land to get food. I need to make money to do that, and in order to that, I need a job because it's very hard to live off the land, most of it being private property. I don't aim to live without computers. I aim to change the world so that we can de-emphasize technology and take down this destructive society. We are killing animals and it's not right. It's a value judgement and it's one I intend to fight and defend until we stop our destruction.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  Dietary guidelines are a red herring. Notwithstanding that the "Americanized" diet has shifted well beyond those, average people don't typically consult it. Rates of obesity have been shooting up for a century so I see no reason to believe guidelines play a substantial role. Guidelines have also recently changed (at least in my country) yet there is no sign of improvement in obesity rates. There was a key turning point that is weirdly understated: women joined the workforce. New conveniences in the form of appliances and fast-food, canned food, ready-made food freed up more time for them to pursue careers (at least, part-time) and still raise kids. The US enthusiastically embraced these modernities and many families effectively threw away their knowledge of cooking over time. After this the institutions that feed us garbage became entrenched, began to both lobby to protect their interests and increase their adoption rate as much as possible. It's not unlike the story of Tobacco companies.
  - loudmax 2y ago
    I tend to agree with this take. Shifting from home cooked meals to processed meals probably has far more impact on diet and health than published guidelines. The only nuance I'd add is that it doesn't follow that the optimal solution is for women to leave the workforce and get back in the kitchen. Domestic responsibilities can be shared by husbands and wives. Also, when eating processed foods it's a good idea to pay attention to the nutrition information. Most people don't do much of this, which is why those published guidelines probably don't have much impact anyway. Those guidelines should be updated, and most people should probably start paying more attention to them.
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      Of course. We would not go back to that any sooner than working our own land, turning back the clock is no solution. The problem area is policy and culture rather than technology in itself. Between kitchen innovations and store-bought items (and other services) it's possible to eat healthy delicious food with increasingly less effort (and it's possible to have a horrifically bad diet). I think the younger generations, starting from millenials on, are more health conscious than the previous, but you also notice a class divide in that sense.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
> Today, over 70 percent of American adults and one-fifth of the children are overweight or obese, Today I learned that 70% of Americans are obese. Never been to america but I'm truly baffled how people and the government could let this happen. I know that in America the government is supposed not to interfere with people choice but here it's not just some people being lazy and camping at McDonald's.
- ldoughty 2y ago
  Reread the quote -- You're misinterpreting the sentence. 70% of Americans are overweight. But not all of those are obese.
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  not saying it’s not an epidemic but I would be part of this stats with a BMI of 27. BMI isn’t very accurate for taller people
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    Also isn't accurate for denser people.
    - tmnvix 2y ago
      Oh come now. The formula is dead simple!
      - datadrivenangel 2y ago
        You're technically correct. It's a formula, it's never 'wrong'. The issue is the mapping of the formula to health outcomes and categories and the limitations of it as a tool.
        sabbaticaldev 2y ago
        I wouldn’t put “denser” people in the same group as tall people. Having heavy bones is an old excuse for being skinny-fat which is unhealthy
SteveSmith16384 2y ago
Maybe this is the issue: 95% of the 2020 DGAC was found by an analysis to have at least one tie with a food or pharmaceutical company, and 50% had 30 such ties or more. (https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/usda-fails-to-fully-implement-natl-academies-recs-for-transparency https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/usda-fails-to-fully-i...)
ldoughty 2y ago
Takes a long while to get to any points.. > Chronic high carbohydrate consumption — especially of refined grains and added sugars — drives obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders Also, the article mentions saturated fats are over vilified.
lukas099 2y ago
> Since the first guidelines were published in 1980, we’ve been told to fear fat and instead consume about half of all calories as carbohydrates. The current guidelines recommend up to 10 percent of calories as added sugar and six servings of grains daily, including three as refined grains. The guidelines don’t say you should eat sugar and refined grains. They say, if you eat them, you should really limit them to 10% of calories and half your grains at most. They also don’t say to “fear fat”; that’s just completely made up. They do say to limit saturated fat but this is evidence-based, as are benefits of whole grains.
- lukas099 2y ago
  I also think it’s telling that the guidelines for added sugar and saturated fats are exactly the same: limit them to no more than 10% of your calories. But the authors frame this completely differently when it’s about sat fat (“unfounded hostility”) than when it’s about added sugars (“guidelines recommend up to 10 percent“)
- xenonite 2y ago
  No, guidelines say that at least 50% of energy should come from carbohydrates. This ratio is exactly what the article is criticizing. And of course, carbs are converted to sugar in the end.
  - lukas099 2y ago
    Carbohydrates from whole grains are different from added sugars and have completely different effects on the body.
    - xenonite 2y ago
      This is not what the article tells, this is what you assume. I agree that they emphasize sugar and refined grains, but they also criticize high carbohydrates in general. > Chronic high carbohydrate consumption — especially of refined grains and added sugars — drives obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders.
martinbaun 2y ago
And the US dietary guidelines are seen by many countries as the golden standard and replicated to their own countries. Consumption of animals have been steeply falling for the last 70 years, while seed oils consumption have grown. If you search for the graph you'll be amazed, it is so clear what is causing this.
- mfer 2y ago
  Production of animals for consumption has been on the rise [1] at a rate that's higher than population growth. In the North American and Europe it looks to have stabilized and maybe declined a little [2]. That's not a steep decline. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this-is-how-many-animals-we-eat-each-year/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this...
- piva00 2y ago
  > If you search for the graph you'll be amazed, it is so clear what is causing this. Can you provide peer reviewed studies showing this as a causative effect?
- infecto 2y ago
  - I never got the impression that other countries around the world see the US food standard as the gold standard. - Consumption of meat has been going up. - Seed oils is a huge red flag of folks perpetuating self-researched knowledge which is worse than any US dietary guideline. - This one is off topic but the website for the product you are building is filled with very poor english. This is not a knock but rather you might want to work on your copy more since you are advertising it as a the best.
- diventando 2y ago
  I can only find viral misinformation about seed oil??? Looks like consumption of animals has increased https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumption-by-type-kilograms-per-year?country=OWID_WRL~Americas+%28FAO%29 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...
mfer 2y ago
For guidelines that came out in 2020, the people involved had financial and career history ties to the food industry. The chair had ties to the dairy industry. I mean industry (business) rather than the topic area.
bfrog 2y ago
It's hard not to be fat in the US when 90% of the time people are sitting down doing nothing. Car centric culture and infrastructure, along with unregulated highly addictive packaged food. What could possibly go wrong? Good thing the medical care is affordable and excellent /s
- gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
  Where is personal responsibility in this conversation? Most suburbs have side walks. What prevents people from going for walks? Most WFO people could easily buy a used Total Gym from FB marketplace and work out during the business day. People can buy walking pads for the cube in the office for around $160. People could buy healthier foods and cook at home. All of this takes time but we’re taking about people with cars. They are probably in an economic class where they can afford better food.
  - eimrine 2y ago
    > What prevents people from going for walks? Nowhere to go if you are living in a white neighborhood?
    - gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
      Go around the block a few times.
      - eimrine 2y ago
        You inside of American cities are as miserable as a bird in the cage. Your language do not even have a word which means not just "to walk" in the sence of "to move yourself on foot" but "to walk for the sake of joy".
        gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
        Yes we do: amble. Noun - a walk at a slow, relaxed pace, especially for pleasure: "a peaceful riverside amble"
lukas099 2y ago
I find it hard to believe that only the grain and sugar industries have powerful lobbyists, and the poor red meat industry has none.
bmelton 2y ago
I remember seeing a brief documentary on Youtube, detailing how school lunches were made in Japan. They just followed the lunch production for a single day, but it was enlightening. The menu that day was teriyaki yellowtail tuna, with roasted burdock root, apple slices, tonjiru miso soup with pork, tofu, wok-fried vegetables and dashi, with Koshikihari rice from the Nagano province. Everything was prepared fresh in the morning, placed into bento boxes, and delivered by lunch for consumption. The per-student cost of all of this was ~$35 American -- edit -- $35 for the entire month. Roughly $1.70 a day to feed a student an amazing meal. I was frankly dumbfounded at how delicious everything looked, and especially for how cheaply everything had been prepared. I would have been delighted to pay $15 or more for this meal.
- cmptrnerd6 2y ago
  Forgive my confusion, but, are you saying you would pay $15 for a meal that cost $35?
  - bmelton 2y ago
    It costs $35 to deliver 20-22 meals of that quality to a given student. One every school day for the month. Effectively, that meal was delivered -- SOMEHOW -- for a cost of $1.70 Edit: I see that not all of the words in my thought made it into the comment, and it was confusing. Updated.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  The problem is that in America school lunches are often welfare food. A lot of people cant afford $15 a day for their kids lunches.
  - bmelton 2y ago
    Sorry, I was accidentally very confusing. It cost $35 to deliver a month's worth of those meals to a given student
- koolba 2y ago
  > The per-student cost of all of this was ~$35 American. That’s 10x what most schools charge in the USA.
eimrine 2y ago
We in Russia has the very same problem [1], with the local flavor of Stalin's totalitarism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
tmnvix 2y ago
I'd love to see a comparison of countries that looked at how much of the average diet was made up of simple carbohydrates and average weights. I might be wrong, but I suspect that US diets include a greater percentage of simple carbohydrates than most.
ziggyzecat 2y ago
Same in Europe. The obesity itself is just part of the problem. Negative effects on cognition, willpower, stress hormone levels, "fatigue" and so on. It gets people into moods, the blood sugar levels and the stress hormone levels. Makes it easier to sell your product and your story. More stress at work, at school and then at home. Less peace equals striving for compensation and submitting yourself to something that gives you that compensation. It's a brutal story. A tiny deviation from baseline levels is enough and that's exactly what the dietary guidelines resulted in. It was an "unintended" side effect for some time. Then there were patterns.
lolinder 2y ago
A concrete manifestation of this my family runs into all the time is when trying to buy Greek yogurt. There are fat-free versions galore, all either loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners. Full-fat Greek yogurt is plenty sweet without any additives, and my understanding of the science is that it's much healthier for you, but it's sometimes tricky to find it because there's little demand. Greek yogurt is bought by people who nominally care about nutrition—its main selling point is higher protein—but because of these guidelines the demand is for the high-protein high-sugar versions and not the naturally sweet full-fat.
lukas099 2y ago
Here are the guidelines so HN readers can judge for themselves: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans-2020-2025.pdf https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-0...
GrantMoyer 2y ago
I can't take this article seriously. > Americans have increased grain calories by 28 percent since 1970, while reducing red meat intake equally. Butter and egg consumption dropped as vegetable oil use surged 87 percent. We’ve engineered a dietary disaster, swapping wholesome, satiating foods for processed carbohydrates that leave us hungry and sick. In one sentence the author says total caloric intake has significantly increased. In the next she says vegetable oil consumption significantly increased, somehow displacing eggs. And finally, she concludes carbohydrates are to blame for obesity. What?
- tzs 2y ago
  I don't see anything in what you quoted that says total caloric intake has increased. The first sentence says grain calories increased and red meat decreases equally, which would be no net change in the total of grain plus red meat calories. The second sentence says butter and eggs dropped and vegetable oil went way up but doesn't say whether or not one of those changes was bigger than the other.
  - GrantMoyer 2y ago
    You're right; I misread the first sentence. My mistake.
tzs 2y ago
In the mid 20th century the typical Japanese person got 6.9% of their calories from fat and 12.4% from protein, which means 80.7% from carbohydrates. Since then both fat and protein have gone up (due to Western influence?). It was 26.5% from fat and 15.9% from protein by 2000 [1], which means 57.6% from carbohydrates. I'm skeptical of any article that tries to pin American health problems on carbohydrates that does not at least mention Japan and try to explain why Japan was fine with a much higher percentage of carbohydrates than Americans eat. Clearly humans can in fact do fine on a very high carbohydrate diet, so if carbohydrates are a problem in America it has to be something about the particular kinds of carbohydrates we use or how we process or prepare them, not the mere fact that we use a lot of them. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/trends-in-total-energy-macronutrients-and-sodium-intake-among-japanese-findings-from-the-19952016-national-health-and-nutrition-survey/68DC310628856B56348D2F74B7AAFA07 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago
  I am similarly skeptical. I think everyone focuses too much on the what when we should be focusing more on the why. I think people are emotionally eating, and that is the cause of obesity.
Stem0037 2y ago
On a technical note, I'd love to see more data-driven approaches to nutritional science. Maybe we could leverage machine learning and big data to better understand the long-term effects of different diets?
streptomycin 2y ago
Everyone wants some boogeyman to blame. In reality, it's probably just that food is really cheap these days, and America is really rich these days.

35 points by bilsbie 2y ago

Perhaps we'll look back at the deterioration of the American diet as the greatest self-inflicted error of the past 50 years. But it wasn't an accident. The dietary guidelines have been heavily influenced by agribusiness. This been catastrophic for health outcomes and quality of life. There's way more to the story than dietary guidelines, and there isn't complete consensus on what caused the onset of the obesity epidemic, but the dietary guidelines are at the very least an embarrassing artifact of the problem.

dopylitty 2y ago
Whether the correlated problems are the dietary guidelines, microplastic tainted junk food, the terrible healthcare system, or communities designed to rely entirely on cars for transportation the root cause is the way the economic and governmental systems in the US are set up to allow for-profit enterprises to control our lives. The only real fix is to take back control from the companies and remake society into one where health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit.
- Incipient 2y ago
  >health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit. Until the measure of success and quality of a society is measured by health and wellbeing, that won't happen. A society is measured, first and foremost, by GDP, then first and foremost that society will prioritise profits (as a proxy for GDP).
Spooky23 2y ago
Zooming out more, it an example of how the regressive nature of the US Senate fuels a variety of ills, both benign/passive and evil. It’s a mockery of “one man, one vote” principles that improved state governance. We spend billions and create unaccountable misery and suffering because a few states with more sheep than people benefit to the tune of probably less than a billion dollars annually.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
The greatest self-inflicted error was the use of fossil fuels to warm the climate, not a horrible diet. Although, I suppose both come from a similar point of view: the manipulation of our instincts and a lack of a natural philosophy to respect life. In one case, it is indiviudual life, and in another, it is all life put together.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  They said, while comfortably browsing HN and sipping their coffee
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    A rather insipid criticism. Of course, I will try and use every communications medium I can find to say what I think. I would MUCH rather have the world WITHOUT HN, without the internet, and without computers even, if it meant that the extinction rate were back to background. In fact, I would be absolutely overjoyed if I didn't have to use a computer at all (I use one for work and for spreading my ideas.) But here's something: if computers and advanced technology did not exist, then I would have NO reason to write about what I write about. And I don't drink coffee.
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      If you want to live without computers, you can. You've made your value judgement.
      - vouaobrasil 2y ago
        Not really, not if I want to obtain food or at least buy land to get food. I need to make money to do that, and in order to that, I need a job because it's very hard to live off the land, most of it being private property. I don't aim to live without computers. I aim to change the world so that we can de-emphasize technology and take down this destructive society. We are killing animals and it's not right. It's a value judgement and it's one I intend to fight and defend until we stop our destruction.
slothtrop 2y ago
Dietary guidelines are a red herring. Notwithstanding that the "Americanized" diet has shifted well beyond those, average people don't typically consult it. Rates of obesity have been shooting up for a century so I see no reason to believe guidelines play a substantial role. Guidelines have also recently changed (at least in my country) yet there is no sign of improvement in obesity rates. There was a key turning point that is weirdly understated: women joined the workforce. New conveniences in the form of appliances and fast-food, canned food, ready-made food freed up more time for them to pursue careers (at least, part-time) and still raise kids. The US enthusiastically embraced these modernities and many families effectively threw away their knowledge of cooking over time. After this the institutions that feed us garbage became entrenched, began to both lobby to protect their interests and increase their adoption rate as much as possible. It's not unlike the story of Tobacco companies.
- loudmax 2y ago
  I tend to agree with this take. Shifting from home cooked meals to processed meals probably has far more impact on diet and health than published guidelines. The only nuance I'd add is that it doesn't follow that the optimal solution is for women to leave the workforce and get back in the kitchen. Domestic responsibilities can be shared by husbands and wives. Also, when eating processed foods it's a good idea to pay attention to the nutrition information. Most people don't do much of this, which is why those published guidelines probably don't have much impact anyway. Those guidelines should be updated, and most people should probably start paying more attention to them.
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    Of course. We would not go back to that any sooner than working our own land, turning back the clock is no solution. The problem area is policy and culture rather than technology in itself. Between kitchen innovations and store-bought items (and other services) it's possible to eat healthy delicious food with increasingly less effort (and it's possible to have a horrifically bad diet). I think the younger generations, starting from millenials on, are more health conscious than the previous, but you also notice a class divide in that sense.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

> Today, over 70 percent of American adults and one-fifth of the children are overweight or obese, Today I learned that 70% of Americans are obese. Never been to america but I'm truly baffled how people and the government could let this happen. I know that in America the government is supposed not to interfere with people choice but here it's not just some people being lazy and camping at McDonald's.

ldoughty 2y ago
Reread the quote -- You're misinterpreting the sentence. 70% of Americans are overweight. But not all of those are obese.
sabbaticaldev 2y ago
not saying it’s not an epidemic but I would be part of this stats with a BMI of 27. BMI isn’t very accurate for taller people
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Also isn't accurate for denser people.
  - tmnvix 2y ago
    Oh come now. The formula is dead simple!
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      You're technically correct. It's a formula, it's never 'wrong'. The issue is the mapping of the formula to health outcomes and categories and the limitations of it as a tool.
      - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
        I wouldn’t put “denser” people in the same group as tall people. Having heavy bones is an old excuse for being skinny-fat which is unhealthy

SteveSmith16384 2y ago

Maybe this is the issue: 95% of the 2020 DGAC was found by an analysis to have at least one tie with a food or pharmaceutical company, and 50% had 30 such ties or more. (https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/usda-fails-to-fully-implement-natl-academies-recs-for-transparency https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/usda-fails-to-fully-i...)

ldoughty 2y ago

Takes a long while to get to any points.. > Chronic high carbohydrate consumption — especially of refined grains and added sugars — drives obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders Also, the article mentions saturated fats are over vilified.

lukas099 2y ago

> Since the first guidelines were published in 1980, we’ve been told to fear fat and instead consume about half of all calories as carbohydrates. The current guidelines recommend up to 10 percent of calories as added sugar and six servings of grains daily, including three as refined grains. The guidelines don’t say you should eat sugar and refined grains. They say, if you eat them, you should really limit them to 10% of calories and half your grains at most. They also don’t say to “fear fat”; that’s just completely made up. They do say to limit saturated fat but this is evidence-based, as are benefits of whole grains.

lukas099 2y ago
I also think it’s telling that the guidelines for added sugar and saturated fats are exactly the same: limit them to no more than 10% of your calories. But the authors frame this completely differently when it’s about sat fat (“unfounded hostility”) than when it’s about added sugars (“guidelines recommend up to 10 percent“)
xenonite 2y ago
No, guidelines say that at least 50% of energy should come from carbohydrates. This ratio is exactly what the article is criticizing. And of course, carbs are converted to sugar in the end.
- lukas099 2y ago
  Carbohydrates from whole grains are different from added sugars and have completely different effects on the body.
  - xenonite 2y ago
    This is not what the article tells, this is what you assume. I agree that they emphasize sugar and refined grains, but they also criticize high carbohydrates in general. > Chronic high carbohydrate consumption — especially of refined grains and added sugars — drives obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders.

martinbaun 2y ago

And the US dietary guidelines are seen by many countries as the golden standard and replicated to their own countries. Consumption of animals have been steeply falling for the last 70 years, while seed oils consumption have grown. If you search for the graph you'll be amazed, it is so clear what is causing this.

mfer 2y ago
Production of animals for consumption has been on the rise [1] at a rate that's higher than population growth. In the North American and Europe it looks to have stabilized and maybe declined a little [2]. That's not a steep decline. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this-is-how-many-animals-we-eat-each-year/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this...
piva00 2y ago
> If you search for the graph you'll be amazed, it is so clear what is causing this. Can you provide peer reviewed studies showing this as a causative effect?
infecto 2y ago
- I never got the impression that other countries around the world see the US food standard as the gold standard. - Consumption of meat has been going up. - Seed oils is a huge red flag of folks perpetuating self-researched knowledge which is worse than any US dietary guideline. - This one is off topic but the website for the product you are building is filled with very poor english. This is not a knock but rather you might want to work on your copy more since you are advertising it as a the best.
diventando 2y ago
I can only find viral misinformation about seed oil??? Looks like consumption of animals has increased https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumption-by-type-kilograms-per-year?country=OWID_WRL~Americas+%28FAO%29 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...

mfer 2y ago

For guidelines that came out in 2020, the people involved had financial and career history ties to the food industry. The chair had ties to the dairy industry. I mean industry (business) rather than the topic area.

bfrog 2y ago

It's hard not to be fat in the US when 90% of the time people are sitting down doing nothing. Car centric culture and infrastructure, along with unregulated highly addictive packaged food. What could possibly go wrong? Good thing the medical care is affordable and excellent /s

gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
Where is personal responsibility in this conversation? Most suburbs have side walks. What prevents people from going for walks? Most WFO people could easily buy a used Total Gym from FB marketplace and work out during the business day. People can buy walking pads for the cube in the office for around $160. People could buy healthier foods and cook at home. All of this takes time but we’re taking about people with cars. They are probably in an economic class where they can afford better food.
- eimrine 2y ago
  > What prevents people from going for walks? Nowhere to go if you are living in a white neighborhood?
  - gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
    Go around the block a few times.
    - eimrine 2y ago
      You inside of American cities are as miserable as a bird in the cage. Your language do not even have a word which means not just "to walk" in the sence of "to move yourself on foot" but "to walk for the sake of joy".
      - gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
        Yes we do: amble. Noun - a walk at a slow, relaxed pace, especially for pleasure: "a peaceful riverside amble"

lukas099 2y ago

I find it hard to believe that only the grain and sugar industries have powerful lobbyists, and the poor red meat industry has none.

bmelton 2y ago

I remember seeing a brief documentary on Youtube, detailing how school lunches were made in Japan. They just followed the lunch production for a single day, but it was enlightening. The menu that day was teriyaki yellowtail tuna, with roasted burdock root, apple slices, tonjiru miso soup with pork, tofu, wok-fried vegetables and dashi, with Koshikihari rice from the Nagano province. Everything was prepared fresh in the morning, placed into bento boxes, and delivered by lunch for consumption. The per-student cost of all of this was ~$35 American -- edit -- $35 for the entire month. Roughly $1.70 a day to feed a student an amazing meal. I was frankly dumbfounded at how delicious everything looked, and especially for how cheaply everything had been prepared. I would have been delighted to pay $15 or more for this meal.

cmptrnerd6 2y ago
Forgive my confusion, but, are you saying you would pay $15 for a meal that cost $35?
- bmelton 2y ago
  It costs $35 to deliver 20-22 meals of that quality to a given student. One every school day for the month. Effectively, that meal was delivered -- SOMEHOW -- for a cost of $1.70 Edit: I see that not all of the words in my thought made it into the comment, and it was confusing. Updated.
from-nibly 2y ago
The problem is that in America school lunches are often welfare food. A lot of people cant afford $15 a day for their kids lunches.
- bmelton 2y ago
  Sorry, I was accidentally very confusing. It cost $35 to deliver a month's worth of those meals to a given student
koolba 2y ago
> The per-student cost of all of this was ~$35 American. That’s 10x what most schools charge in the USA.

eimrine 2y ago

We in Russia has the very same problem [1], with the local flavor of Stalin's totalitarism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

tmnvix 2y ago

I'd love to see a comparison of countries that looked at how much of the average diet was made up of simple carbohydrates and average weights. I might be wrong, but I suspect that US diets include a greater percentage of simple carbohydrates than most.

ziggyzecat 2y ago

Same in Europe. The obesity itself is just part of the problem. Negative effects on cognition, willpower, stress hormone levels, "fatigue" and so on. It gets people into moods, the blood sugar levels and the stress hormone levels. Makes it easier to sell your product and your story. More stress at work, at school and then at home. Less peace equals striving for compensation and submitting yourself to something that gives you that compensation. It's a brutal story. A tiny deviation from baseline levels is enough and that's exactly what the dietary guidelines resulted in. It was an "unintended" side effect for some time. Then there were patterns.

lolinder 2y ago

A concrete manifestation of this my family runs into all the time is when trying to buy Greek yogurt. There are fat-free versions galore, all either loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners. Full-fat Greek yogurt is plenty sweet without any additives, and my understanding of the science is that it's much healthier for you, but it's sometimes tricky to find it because there's little demand. Greek yogurt is bought by people who nominally care about nutrition—its main selling point is higher protein—but because of these guidelines the demand is for the high-protein high-sugar versions and not the naturally sweet full-fat.

lukas099 2y ago

Here are the guidelines so HN readers can judge for themselves: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans-2020-2025.pdf https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-0...

GrantMoyer 2y ago

I can't take this article seriously. > Americans have increased grain calories by 28 percent since 1970, while reducing red meat intake equally. Butter and egg consumption dropped as vegetable oil use surged 87 percent. We’ve engineered a dietary disaster, swapping wholesome, satiating foods for processed carbohydrates that leave us hungry and sick. In one sentence the author says total caloric intake has significantly increased. In the next she says vegetable oil consumption significantly increased, somehow displacing eggs. And finally, she concludes carbohydrates are to blame for obesity. What?

tzs 2y ago
I don't see anything in what you quoted that says total caloric intake has increased. The first sentence says grain calories increased and red meat decreases equally, which would be no net change in the total of grain plus red meat calories. The second sentence says butter and eggs dropped and vegetable oil went way up but doesn't say whether or not one of those changes was bigger than the other.
- GrantMoyer 2y ago
  You're right; I misread the first sentence. My mistake.

tzs 2y ago

In the mid 20th century the typical Japanese person got 6.9% of their calories from fat and 12.4% from protein, which means 80.7% from carbohydrates. Since then both fat and protein have gone up (due to Western influence?). It was 26.5% from fat and 15.9% from protein by 2000 [1], which means 57.6% from carbohydrates. I'm skeptical of any article that tries to pin American health problems on carbohydrates that does not at least mention Japan and try to explain why Japan was fine with a much higher percentage of carbohydrates than Americans eat. Clearly humans can in fact do fine on a very high carbohydrate diet, so if carbohydrates are a problem in America it has to be something about the particular kinds of carbohydrates we use or how we process or prepare them, not the mere fact that we use a lot of them. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/trends-in-total-energy-macronutrients-and-sodium-intake-among-japanese-findings-from-the-19952016-national-health-and-nutrition-survey/68DC310628856B56348D2F74B7AAFA07 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

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deepfriedchokes 2y ago
I am similarly skeptical. I think everyone focuses too much on the what when we should be focusing more on the why. I think people are emotionally eating, and that is the cause of obesity.

Stem0037 2y ago

On a technical note, I'd love to see more data-driven approaches to nutritional science. Maybe we could leverage machine learning and big data to better understand the long-term effects of different diets?

streptomycin 2y ago

Everyone wants some boogeyman to blame. In reality, it's probably just that food is really cheap these days, and America is really rich these days.