7 ms·

The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingl

The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science. As to the claims that sugar is addictive, this is unsupported - sugar does not meet the DSM-V criteria for addictive substances based on current evidence (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_...) As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks). The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.

ASalazarMX 2y ago
The elephant in the room is that nutrition studies (whose results influence health and economic policy) are frequently funded by dominant players of the food industry, creating a huge conflict of interest. This has to end.
rendang 2y ago
>put whole grains specifically This is false, in the 90s when I grew up there was no such criterion, and the posters of the pyramid prominently depicted sliced white bread. The worst part of the food pyramid was the indication to use all fats and oils sparingly. There's never been any point in which the evidence suggested that olive oil or other monounsaturated fats should be avoided
- KempyKolibri 2y ago
  Agree that the wholesale demonisation of fats was a massive failure of policy. Doubly frustrating because this was known - Ancel Keys' hypothesis was always about saturated fat specifically, and the Keys equation he devised showed the beneficial effects of PUFA. So mainstream nutrition science was on the money, but policy makers and companies less so.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet. More importantly, I think the nutrition community was woefully naive to the point of being negligent when they tried to defend the food pyramid. One quote I heard was "When we were recommending lower far intake, we never imagined Snackwells." Well, why TF not??? It should have been blatantly obvious that by demonizing fat and making people feel like carbs were "free" that companies would react appropriately and come up with fat-free, sugar-stuffed replacements that had a huge amount of calories, left you feeling unsatiated, and tasted like sweet cardboard. Probably even worse was frankenfood like Olestra. I agree with the original point - while I think the field of nutrition science has improved a lot over the past decade, they have a ton to answer for and never did an appropriate "mea culpa" for all the great harm they caused.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  > Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet. pic from wikipedia named USDA pyramid 1995-2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/media/File:USDA_Food_Pyramid.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/medi...
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Wut? Was your comment a joke or satire? This entire thread is about how the food pyramid of that era was an unscientific disaster, so linking to a picture of it is not evidence.
    - riku_iki 2y ago
      you asked for citation of pyramid putting grains in foundation, you got it, not sure what you are complaining about now.
hollerith 2y ago
>The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules). It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me. The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.
- Spagbol 2y ago
  I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages), and that beriberi was a noticed more in times specifically because of industrialization increasing the availability of white rice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency Apperently a lot of white rice is now enriched with thiamine for this reason
  - hollerith 2y ago
    >I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages) I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it. I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them. (I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Let's get real here: the benefits in the USDA Food Pyramid are benefits for agribusiness and the big subsidized food producers. The benefits that the USDA pushes have nothing to do with good nutrition for the average citizen. This is 100% "regulatory capture" as we call it around here. The Food Pyramid is a scam and a hoax, and the more it can be ignored, the better. When I joined a Christian Health Sharing ministry, they determined that I needed remedial help, due to hypertension and dyslipidemia. They assigned me to monthly virtual meetings with a dietician. The dietician's advice horrified me, because it would've made me sicker, and exacerbated my conditions. I approached the ministry's administrators, requested a replacement dietician, and they replaced her alright. The new dietician had basically the same credentials and the same letters after her name, but she was way more flexible, listened to my reasoning, and supported my choices with encouragement. My parents followed every "diet fad" in the 1970s-1980s, from 2% milk, to margarine, to yolk-less-egg-whites, to reducing red meat, to low-sodium everythings, to bottled fluoridated water. It was sheer torture and disgusting. My mother didn't know the first thing about flavor or pleasure in cooking, and never used the spices in her rack. Our food was always bland. For breakfast she'd slap down a jug of milk, a box of Chex, a bowl and a spoon, and abandon me to go do housework. I would sit there and read the mendacious lies known as "Nutrition Panel" on the side, and simply stewed in my resentment for the whole thing. It's a travesty.
- KempyKolibri 2y ago
  Tbh I know it’s not what you’re going for, but your parents’ dietary decisions generally sound based AF (apart from bottled fluoridated water - depending on the fluoride levels in your drinking water that may or may not be beneficial). Chex, I suppose it depends on whether it was wholegrain or not. Wholegrain cereal is associated with pretty good health benefits, refined not so much.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Replacing butter with Margarine is "based AF" now?
    - 2y ago
wathef 2y ago
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is one of the best takes here. It sits squarely in the realm of evidence where the majority of these comments are anecdotal and they don’t translate to population level studies.
riku_iki 2y ago
> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Which leafy vegetables have carbs? Are you talking about fiber? Most leaf veggies like spinach, kale, greens don’t have hardly any carbs at all.
  - gnabgib 2y ago
    Fiber is a carb https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber/ https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber...
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Fiber is carbs, but unlike most of the carbs in the human diet, people cannot convert them into simple sugars.
      - teytra 2y ago
        The point is how much of the carbs are you actually getting. The fibers that you excrete isn't part of your net intake.
        hollerith 2y ago
        By definition, the human body cannot convert fiber into carbs the human body can burn (but microbes do turn some of the fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which is fuel for human colon cells). That is how "fiber" is defined.
GuB-42 2y ago
The food pyramid makes economic sense. Grains are cheap and energy dense, if your goal is to feed a large population it makes a lot of sense to put them at the base of the pyramid, that's what will keep you alive, as in, not starving. Higher up are fruits and vegetables, also cheap, they will provide with nutrients that you need to stay healthy on top of the calories that will keep you alive. Higher up are animal products, expensive but rich in proteins and a few other nutrients that are a bit lacking in the base layers, they help you get stronger and more performant in addition to healthy and alive. On top are pleasure foods, not really necessary for your body, but enjoyable. I take it like a mirror of the "hierarchy of needs" pyramid rather than nutritional advice for people with effectively unlimited resources.
- mcmoor 2y ago
  Yeah I always see it as the minimum thing to get if you have limited money. For poor people, most of your money is better utilized to get grains instead of meat. When I saw it in my local village's clinic it makes sense because it actually encourages eating some meat and fruit instead of none, which is the norm here because of poverty.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
This is the story as old as time. Much of science is good faith, fairly accurate, and nuanced. Policy and advocacy is deceptive, dishonest, and lacks nuance.

ASalazarMX 2y ago

The elephant in the room is that nutrition studies (whose results influence health and economic policy) are frequently funded by dominant players of the food industry, creating a huge conflict of interest. This has to end.

rendang 2y ago

>put whole grains specifically This is false, in the 90s when I grew up there was no such criterion, and the posters of the pyramid prominently depicted sliced white bread. The worst part of the food pyramid was the indication to use all fats and oils sparingly. There's never been any point in which the evidence suggested that olive oil or other monounsaturated fats should be avoided

KempyKolibri 2y ago
Agree that the wholesale demonisation of fats was a massive failure of policy. Doubly frustrating because this was known - Ancel Keys' hypothesis was always about saturated fat specifically, and the Keys equation he devised showed the beneficial effects of PUFA. So mainstream nutrition science was on the money, but policy makers and companies less so.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet. More importantly, I think the nutrition community was woefully naive to the point of being negligent when they tried to defend the food pyramid. One quote I heard was "When we were recommending lower far intake, we never imagined Snackwells." Well, why TF not??? It should have been blatantly obvious that by demonizing fat and making people feel like carbs were "free" that companies would react appropriately and come up with fat-free, sugar-stuffed replacements that had a huge amount of calories, left you feeling unsatiated, and tasted like sweet cardboard. Probably even worse was frankenfood like Olestra. I agree with the original point - while I think the field of nutrition science has improved a lot over the past decade, they have a ton to answer for and never did an appropriate "mea culpa" for all the great harm they caused.

riku_iki 2y ago
> Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet. pic from wikipedia named USDA pyramid 1995-2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/media/File:USDA_Food_Pyramid.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/medi...
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Wut? Was your comment a joke or satire? This entire thread is about how the food pyramid of that era was an unscientific disaster, so linking to a picture of it is not evidence.
  - riku_iki 2y ago
    you asked for citation of pyramid putting grains in foundation, you got it, not sure what you are complaining about now.

hollerith 2y ago

>The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules). It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me. The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.

Spagbol 2y ago
I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages), and that beriberi was a noticed more in times specifically because of industrialization increasing the availability of white rice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency Apperently a lot of white rice is now enriched with thiamine for this reason
- hollerith 2y ago
  >I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages) I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it. I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them. (I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Let's get real here: the benefits in the USDA Food Pyramid are benefits for agribusiness and the big subsidized food producers. The benefits that the USDA pushes have nothing to do with good nutrition for the average citizen. This is 100% "regulatory capture" as we call it around here. The Food Pyramid is a scam and a hoax, and the more it can be ignored, the better. When I joined a Christian Health Sharing ministry, they determined that I needed remedial help, due to hypertension and dyslipidemia. They assigned me to monthly virtual meetings with a dietician. The dietician's advice horrified me, because it would've made me sicker, and exacerbated my conditions. I approached the ministry's administrators, requested a replacement dietician, and they replaced her alright. The new dietician had basically the same credentials and the same letters after her name, but she was way more flexible, listened to my reasoning, and supported my choices with encouragement. My parents followed every "diet fad" in the 1970s-1980s, from 2% milk, to margarine, to yolk-less-egg-whites, to reducing red meat, to low-sodium everythings, to bottled fluoridated water. It was sheer torture and disgusting. My mother didn't know the first thing about flavor or pleasure in cooking, and never used the spices in her rack. Our food was always bland. For breakfast she'd slap down a jug of milk, a box of Chex, a bowl and a spoon, and abandon me to go do housework. I would sit there and read the mendacious lies known as "Nutrition Panel" on the side, and simply stewed in my resentment for the whole thing. It's a travesty.

KempyKolibri 2y ago
Tbh I know it’s not what you’re going for, but your parents’ dietary decisions generally sound based AF (apart from bottled fluoridated water - depending on the fluoride levels in your drinking water that may or may not be beneficial). Chex, I suppose it depends on whether it was wholegrain or not. Wholegrain cereal is associated with pretty good health benefits, refined not so much.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Replacing butter with Margarine is "based AF" now?
  - 2y ago

wathef 2y ago

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is one of the best takes here. It sits squarely in the realm of evidence where the majority of these comments are anecdotal and they don’t translate to population level studies.

riku_iki 2y ago

> The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption. my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.

EasyMark 2y ago
Which leafy vegetables have carbs? Are you talking about fiber? Most leaf veggies like spinach, kale, greens don’t have hardly any carbs at all.
- gnabgib 2y ago
  Fiber is a carb https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber/ https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/fiber...
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Fiber is carbs, but unlike most of the carbs in the human diet, people cannot convert them into simple sugars.
    - teytra 2y ago
      The point is how much of the carbs are you actually getting. The fibers that you excrete isn't part of your net intake.
      - hollerith 2y ago
        By definition, the human body cannot convert fiber into carbs the human body can burn (but microbes do turn some of the fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which is fuel for human colon cells). That is how "fiber" is defined.

GuB-42 2y ago

The food pyramid makes economic sense. Grains are cheap and energy dense, if your goal is to feed a large population it makes a lot of sense to put them at the base of the pyramid, that's what will keep you alive, as in, not starving. Higher up are fruits and vegetables, also cheap, they will provide with nutrients that you need to stay healthy on top of the calories that will keep you alive. Higher up are animal products, expensive but rich in proteins and a few other nutrients that are a bit lacking in the base layers, they help you get stronger and more performant in addition to healthy and alive. On top are pleasure foods, not really necessary for your body, but enjoyable. I take it like a mirror of the "hierarchy of needs" pyramid rather than nutritional advice for people with effectively unlimited resources.

mcmoor 2y ago
Yeah I always see it as the minimum thing to get if you have limited money. For poor people, most of your money is better utilized to get grains instead of meat. When I saw it in my local village's clinic it makes sense because it actually encourages eating some meat and fruit instead of none, which is the norm here because of poverty.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

This is the story as old as time. Much of science is good faith, fairly accurate, and nuanced. Policy and advocacy is deceptive, dishonest, and lacks nuance.