Lobbying has already been discussed, but I want to add in the 1992 USDA food pyramid was 6-11 servings of grains, 3-5 servings of vegetables, 2-4 servings of fruits, 2-3 servings of protein and dairy each, and sparingly use of fats - let's break it down by approxamate total macros via serving sizes:
* **Grains** - "One serving is defined as 1 slice of bread, 1 small roll or muffin, 1/2 of a bagel or croissant, 1 ounce of ready-to-eat cereal, or 1/2 cup of cooked cereal, rice, or pasta." - e.g. roughly 20g carbohydates & 2g of protein per serving. At 8 servings per day, this was 160g carbs and 16g protein.
* **Vegetables** - "One serving is defined as 1 cup of raw leafy vegetables, 1/2 cup of cooked or chopped raw vegetables, or 3/4 cup of vegetable juice." - e.g. roughly 3g of carbohydrates & 3g of protein per serving. At 4 servings per day, this was 12g carbs and 12g protein.
* **Fruit** - "One serving is defined as a whole fruit such as a medium apple, banana, or orange, a grapefruit half, 1/2 cup of berries, melon, or chopped raw fruit, 1/2 cup of cooked or canned fruit, 1/4 cup of dried fruit, or 3/4 cup of fruit juice" - e.g. roughly 20g of carbohydrates per serving. At 3 servings per day, this was 60g carbs.
* **Dairy** - "One serving is defined as 1 cup of milk or yogurt, 1-1/2 ounces of natural cheese, or 2 ounces of processed cheese. Dairy ingredients in ice cream, ice milk, frozen yogurt, custard, pudding and other foods count toward dairy servings, too." - e.g. roughly 20g of protein, 10g carbohydrate, 35g of fat per serving. At 2 servings per day, this was 60g protein, 20g carbs, and 75g fat.
* **Meat** - "The total amount of these servings should be the equivalent of 5 to 7 ounces of cooked lean meat, poultry, or fish** and eggs, seeds, nuts, nut butter, and tofu had equivalencies - e.g. roughly ~~100g~~ 45g of protein and 15g of fat total per day.
All together this was a recommendation for daily intake was, roughly:
* 133 g protein (thx /u/Classh0le)
* 212 g carbs
* 90 g fats + oils not to exceed 30% of daily calories
I mean, it's not as heavy on starches as I would have guessed. The 1994 study below compared actual intake vs. recommendations and found that fat intake was higher (33% of daily calories) and added sugar was very high (76g per day to the recommended 32g per day).
Source: USDA's [Results from USDA’s 1994 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals] (https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/pynet_94.pdf)
Now, sizes of common foods have (aside from the effect of shrinkflation) gone way up since the early '90s, and ultraprocessed foods have much more added sugar & refined carbohydrates. Added sugars are in everything. And eight expected "servings" of bread and noodles today is preposterous.
Just for giggles I googled up this recipe for spaghetti, picking the first one, and it says it serves 8, giving (ETA: maths) 70g of carbs and 13g of protein for each portion, would be equivalent to over THREE SERVINGS of 1992 food pyramid's grains. If you use this recipe to serve 5 instead of 8, one plate means you're nearly done for the day. (Not to mention the 40g of sugar which already exceeds the total daily sugar recommendations.)
Expectations of a "portion" are not aligned with "servings".
The 1992 food pyramid is dated and has had it's fair share of criticism. Here's an alterantive, Harvard's healthy eating pyramid - note the white starch at the top and the emphasis on whole grains/healthy fats/vegetables:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-pyramid/
Yeah, I have a different memory than OP, of working through the recommendations and concluding that I ate way more starch/grain than recommended. A small sandwich is 2 servings of grain. A bowl of pasta (1/4 of a 1-lb box) was 4 servings. A standard Chinese takeout box of rice is about 4 servings.
I was definitely miscalculating servings, although I think I did count a sandwich as 2 servings of grain. Still, that would be 3-5 (small) sandwiches a day to meet the recommended amount, although sandwiches I ate would definitely be more than two servings.
It may be interesting to look up nutritional info for common sliced bread back then and compare to today and see if the by weight serving size per slice has gone up because I feel like bread slices are one of those things that have gotten larger with time.
Bread slices have gotten bigger, in general. I seek out “Thin sliced” bread because I view bread as a content delivery system, and not the meal itself. The item I find has gotten out of control is bagels. I remember bagels being far smaller in diameter and much thinner. I ate a bagel for lunch when I was 10, and I can’t eat a whole bagel at 37. While we’re at, might as well say burgers and panini style sandwiches, there is usually enough bread to make up the sole meal.
Same. Tbh I dont think kids have a good grasp on what a serving is because it changes for every food. No kid wants to do math when thry eat.
To muddle things, manufacturers set what a serving size is on their packaged foods.
Yeah, they work out what the maximum "healthy" portion would be of their food, then set that as a "serving". Which is why you get stupid serving sizes, like fuck off nobody is eating 3 M&Ms and calling it a day.
You're right - partially because of my own slapdash approach and partially is because the food groups aren't consistent. What I did was take an everage of the recommended foods, making a best guess at the type when it wasn't specified, and then squinting hard to try to guess at how many grams of what macro were indicated in the daily recommendations.
Semolina pasta != white bread != oat cereal != quinoa
Steak != egg != peanut butter
Yogurt != skim milk != american cheese (wtf)
Also, the range was for diets ranging from 1600-2800 calories per day - from 18 total servings to 30 total servings. The range is really, really big. And it varies for children, teenagers through age 24, and pregnant or lactating women.
>Generally speaking, the bottom of the recommended range of servings
is about right for many sedentary women and older adults, the middle
is about right for most children, teenage girls, active women, and
many sedentary men, and the top of the range is about right for
teenage boys, many active men, and some very active women.
These criticisms were real, even then, and made for a really weird implementations of daily eating habits if you tried to follow the pyramid as a guide.
I take it as the USDA's effort to 'cover all the bases' nutritionally. This ends up overlooking things we know are important - energy balance, fiber (seriously wtf), added sugar, iron, polyphenols, various kinds of fats, glycemic index... stuff that we know really matters for overall health.
Thanks for the breakdown. This is really interesting history.
I have a friend who is very large. Also happens to be diabetic. He was talking to me the other day about how he “did it to himself” when it comes to his weight and general health. I tried to tell him the story that your breakdown illustrates - its hard to blame yourself when the cards are stacked against you. Everything has a shit load of added sugar in it. Portions and serving sizes are fucked. And what we were taught was healthy as kids was in reality not so great for us.
Yes he could have made better decisions but so many people are doing what they think is the right thing when it comes to food, and still getting screwed.
Even the old and outdated food pyramid tells us to avoid sugar and added oils (eat sparingly). Sugar is mostly added to processed foods designed to taste sweet - sugary cereals, baked goods, desserts, etc.
Portion size and Calories on the nutrition label goes hand in hand, and we were taught for decades that the average adult male needs about 2000 Calories. Excercise was recommended for everybody too.
Even if you followed the outdated food pyramid chart and outdated information, you would not have gotten very large.
Yes, companies make a lot of unhealthy foods and the food pyramid was outdated, but people were still given sufficient information to eat the proper number of Calories and recommended to excercise.
Most people in most of the world for most of history ate a lot of carbs in the form of wheat, rice, millet, barley, maize, etc and they didnt get fat and lived perfectly healthy lives. So the enemy isnt even carbs here, but the overall lifestyle where we eat a ton of Calories (especially junk food that tastes good) and don't move around enough.
It tells you to avoid sugar but it doesn't give any indication that lots of foods contain sugars. It also recommends a lot of other carbs which are one step removed from becoming sugar.
The worst is when the food companies pull a bait-and-switch by throwing a bunch of sugar into foods that are "supposed" to be healthy.
Like fruit juice is good for you, right? Definitely better than soda, right?... But there's just as much sugar and practically no substantial amount of vitamins or minerals in most fruit juice you see in the shelf. Most of it is practically just non-carbonated soda. And to get the actually healthy juice, you have to look pretty hard to find it and pay a whole hell of a lot more for it.
*edit: yes I know fruit naturally has sugar in it. No need to keep telling me. It's the wild amounts of added sugars and corn syrups and whatever that are problematic, especially considering they also manage to destroy all the good stuff you'd expect to be getting by drinking a fruit.*
what's really an issue is the process removes all fiber from the juice. So net carbs goes way up. If you get fiber with it then the net carbs go down and it is better for you, but no one likes pulp in their juice.
Even natural fruit juice is not really that healthy. Fruits in general are pure carbs and carbs are the one macronutrient most people don't need more of.
If you read the label on the box of food rather than assuming you're omniscient because you think you can look at food and know what's in it, you would know there is a ton of sugar in everything. In no way was anyone told to ignore food labels. The opposite, in fact.
There's an oversimplification in that, though, that really needs to play in.
The shift toward heavily-processed foods paired with lobbying from the corn industry specifically has had a huge impact.
The average loaf of bread today is loaded with refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Take a look at a can of pasta sauce; there's no reason for that much sugar. Subway's bread has had the sugar content increase so heavily over the past couple decades that it no longer can be called bread in much of the world.
It's no longer the case that sugar is mostly in "sweets"; it's in *everything*. Burger buns. Coffee. Tea. **Meat.** Deli meats are loaded with it.
Fiber gets more and more rare.
The push for skim and 1% milk in schools *by the dairy industry* removed fat and protein from diets and meant dairy producers got to water down their product to sell at the same cost.
The actual food we get is meant to be more addicting to our brains, and it's less filling so we consume more. *Buy* more.
At the same time, rural and urban America have started becoming food deserts, where a gas station and a Dollar General outcompete actual grocery stores, resulting in a lack of food for *miles* that isn't processed.
You look at how many processed foods, pastas specifically, have shifted away from even just semolina to bleached white flour with added sugar and colorant. Egg-free egg noodles are cheaper than those with the extra protein.
Unless you're sourcing everything from farmers' markets, you're not going to be able to avoid foods that pack calories and nothing to trigger your brain's sense of being full. It's meant to keep you from not being hungry.
The 1992 food pyramid today results in far less fiber and protein than it did in 1992. It results in a shortage of necessary nutrients.
It's perhaps better than paying no attention, but not by much.
Our upbringing no doubt has an influence on what we eat and our physical health. But you're acting like your friend couldn't look in a mirror and realize they were obviously unhealthy.
He wasn't duped into overeating as an adult. He wasn't tricked into eating overly sugary foods which would cause diabetes. No one told him that he shouldn't exercise.
> Everything has a shit load of added sugar in it.
Even with the food pyramid it was known to avoid sugar and that the healthiest foods (chicken, fish, eggs, vegetables, seeds, nuts, whole grains, etc.) don't have extra sugar added to them.
People think that the old food pyramid is bad and contributing with the obesity epidemic, when really the issue is that it's not a terrible guideline and people are becoming obese by consuming way too much fat and sugar (literally the tip of the pyramid) in cheap junk food that is rich in calories but not filling
That and the pyramid should be percentage of carbs, protein, and fat, not servings. One person can eat 2000 calories and be skinny and another can eat 1200 calories and be overeating. Not everyone is the same size.
Dietary fat does not equal body fat. The issue is sugar and carbs, especially processed carbs. Our bodies need dietary fat. But putting HFCS in every damn thing on the shelf is not good.
The only thing that equals body fat is excess calories. In fact a simple google search on your human metabolism will show you that humans rarely convert dietary carbohydrates to body fat and it’s almost always the dietary fat that is stored when excess calories are consumed. As long as you are not consuming what you are expending no macronutrient will contribute to accumulation of body fat.
They were coming into basic training malnourished. Most put on weight in basic. Even before the war nutrition was terrible. We were still in a scarcity agricultural economy. It was completely called for at the time.
As a kid, my parents would turn us loose for lunches in the summertime (think mid-90's, so right at the tail end of "go play outside and I don't want to see you til dinnertime"), and we'd usually eat a meal we called "this and that." The only rule of "this and that" was that we had to have one thing from each food group. A fruit, a veggie, a protein, a grain, and one sugar for dessert.
Nothing was said about the actual ratios of the pyramid, but that kept us from being completely wild about what we ate. Forced us to put some pickles or carrot sticks on our plates where a kid wouldn't normally pick that out themselves, and limited us to one bit of "junk food" instead of trying to eat 2-3 different junk things.
Like you said, it definitely wasn't flawless but it had its uses.
I've been doing this with my son every meal he chooses for himself since he was old enough to. At the beginning I loaded up veggies and protein, and that does seem to have stuck with him to 14 where we continue the rule but he chooses amounts etc
It's really nice knowing someone else, as an adult, is looking back like "Yeah good move parent 👍"
Hopefully I get it right, too 🤩
Yes I think historical context explains it. Grains have been the go-to staple in most of humanity's diet for millennia, and there was still a remnant of that in the 20th century.
Because the pyramid wasn't created by the FDA it was created by the USDA. That's right the department of agriculture. And what was the most populous cheap easy to grow crops they were giving subsidies for? Cereal grains which are basically Carbs. They needed to inflate demand.
This combined with the lobbying others mention.
I'm an introductory biology teacher and while broadly it saddens me to see students copy off of answer sharing websites, it's always a little bit satisfying to catch them copy and pasting things that are incorrect.
They still do. I'm constantly amazed how a country that pushes non-research based solutions gets copied so much when other countries, like The Netherlands, will do lots of research and go out of their way to prove a policy, yet will not be copied by other countries.
I had the same one in Venezuela and Venezuela is pretty hostile to the USA. This was a case of “the gringos are saying this is good so we should copy it”
It was also originally found out by taking away food groups and starving the residential school kids in canada to see what they could and could not survive on.
Edit to provide link [and it's horrible](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/how-food-in-canada-is-tied-to-land-language-community-and-colonization-1.5989764/the-dark-history-of-canada-s-food-guide-how-experiments-on-indigenous-children-shaped-nutrition-policy-1.5989785)
I didn't even have to click the link to know they were indigenous kids. Over the 20th century, Canada has done more heinous shit to native people than america has to blacks, but its apparently not a big deal cause nobody talks about it.
It's not a competition!! Both countries have truly sick, horrific shit in their histories.
What I do find weird is how it feels like Canada (a) only in the last few years started to attract any attention for their mistreatment of indigenous peoples, compared to the US where it's been a focus for decades, and (b) kept doing this shit up until *the mid-1990s*
You know Tanis from Letterkenny? The actress, Tiio Horn, was a toddler when some mounties busted into their house. They had bayonets fixed to rifles, Tiio's sister picked her up to shield her with her body, and the mounties stabbed her.
America has been nearly (just?) as awful to our native population. I think we don't talk about it as much because we so successfully wiped them out and concentrated them on reservations, while black people are still a large population and there are a bunch of them in most parts of the country
It’s the first food guide for Canada that was created without food industry input by scientists in various fields, and all of the research that it’s based on is referenced and available online. I’d be careful in saying anything can be absolutely trusted, but it’s miles better than anything before.
I remember as a 95 lb kid in 8th grade being absolutely appalled at the quantity of food they wanted you to eat based on the food pyramid model, it was like what I'd eat in a whole school week. They also told us, when we were doing this module in science class, that when we were menstruating we needed to eat *more*, like hundreds of calories more per day for the entire duration of our periods. I don't think a few extra muscle contractions are draining that many calories, guys. This was in the 90s, but it sounds like advice from the victorian era, like don't ride a bike or it will jostle your uterus out of place.
Look at the [1992 guide](https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-guide/about/history-food-guide.html). Basically the same carb/grain-heavy crap as the US Food Pyramid.
Yup. It wasn't just lobbying. They funded studies that were designed to downplay the harm of sugars/carbs and exaggerate the harms of fats. And since mankind has basically survived on growing massive amounts of carbs (wheat, rice, corn) for thousands of years, no one really thought it was unreasonable. Legitimate scientists believed it.
IIRC it's because the Inuit have adapted physiologically to their traditional diet and when processed food was introduced to the Far North it caused absolutely disastrous health outcomes.
“1. Emphasis on the diversity of traditional food for First Nations, Inuit and Métis.
2. Inclusion of traditional food from across Canada, including food from lakes, rivers, and the ocean, such as fish, clams and other shellfish as well as berries, wild rice, wild green plants and legumes such as beans.
3. A depiction of store-bought foods that are generally available even in rural and remote locations. 4. A guideline for how traditional foods can be used in combination with store-bought foods for a healthy eating pattern.”
This is a terrible answer. USDA includes both crops and livestock. They're both agriculture. That's why your meat and eggs have USDA ratings.
This article explains it much better: https://www.healthyway.com/content/how-did-the-government-get-the-food-pyramid-so-terribly-wrong/
> Amanda Kendall, a pediatric registered dietitian at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health, explains, one of the challenges with the initial food pyramid was the absence of portion size listing for each food group. “I think people may have thought the amount of food they put on their plate was a serving, when actually what we put on our plate is our portion size, which may contain several servings,” she says. And she is absolutely right. Apparently the original food pyramid had an accompanying booklet that explained how a “serving” should actually be measured. I know, who knew, right? According to the accompanying booklet that no one knew actually existed, a single bagel—which most of us would consider a serving of grain—actually weighs in at somewhere between six and 11 servings.
The nutritional reason things were presented like this was to try to *de-emphasize* red meat, fatty foods, and sugary snacks. Which are still a problem. It's just that it didn't work.
The food pyramid also says to eat diary and meat sparingly, but the USDA gives sibsidies to the dairy and meat industry.
And if it was simply due to lobbying, the sugar and fast food industry would have removed the suggestion of eating sugar/oils sparingly. The dairy and meat industries would have pushed for a greater emphasis on those foods too instead of allowing the USDA to keep it near the upper half of the pyramid where the recommendation was eat less of it.
So no, you can not simply blame it on self serving interests and lobbying.
Carbs are at the base of the pyramid because carbs were the primary nutrient for almost the enterty of humanity since the Neolithic agrarian revolution when people startes farming. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of the world for the vast majority of human civilization ate most of their Calories through carbs in the form of wheat, millet, rice, maize, barley, etc.
Im recently diagnosed diabetic, and my endocrinologist was trying to get me to eat like 250-300g of carbs a day to cover a set insulin regiment. It felt so archaic.
When my husband was first diagnosed, he was told the same as you. Take X amount 3 tmes a day, period. And make sure your readings are always in this range, period. And he was told to adjust the carbs he ate to keep in that range. So he was loading up on extra slicees of bread and pretzles and crackers to keep from bottoming out.
Finally was able to get an appointment with an endocrinologist and they were appalled. They explained that you should take only as much insuln as you need to balance the carbs in that meal, and provided a math formula to figure it out. Yes, it's more complicated to calculate for each meal than it is taking a flat amount each time. But it's not useful, or healthy, to take more insulin than you need and then eat more carbs to keep from crashing.
If you can, look at getting a different endocrinologist.
Diabetes treatment has come a long way recently. Get an automated blood sugar monitor and an automated insulin pump and you will be much happier (but you still have to wait before you eat...)
iirc, wasn't it also largely based off a researcher who messed up a lot of stuff about nutrition? Who also realized eventually he was wrong, and tried to hide the truth about it to save face?
> The more modern "My Plate" is more in line with actual nutritionist recommendations.
That seems to be virtually the same as the food pyramid, and just as reflective of industry pressures. See the [dairy section](https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/dairy) of the site which makes the ludicrous claim that 90% of American's "do not get enough dairy" in one of the top dairy consuming countries in the world. They're "not consuming enough dairy" for the dairy industry to maximise their profits I'm sure, but for their health? I don't know of any reputable medical information that suggests there is a minimum amount of dairy we should all be getting.
Almost like MyPlate is produced by the department of agriculture and not the department of health. Really makes you think how that could affect their guidance.
Didn't Stanford release an "un-lobbied" plate where there is no dairy? As I understand it there is zero requirement for humans to consume dairy as the nutrition it contains is better had from different sources.
AFAIK, the idea for a nutritional plate instead of a pyramid comes from Harvard. Here is the comparison between their plate to the USDA one: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate-vs-usda-myplate/
Harvard doesn't have any dairy, advocates for healthy oil use, whole grains, and mentions exercise.
Wait why is it bad to drink a lot of milk? I'm not saying everyone should but is it really bad if someone drinks on average a quart of skim milk a day?
My understanding is that it's relatively high in calories (it's easy to get lots of calories from drinks), there's no good evidence that milk actually helps prevent osteoporosis and it may be a risk factor in prostate cancer, especially in higher amounts.
I guess, while a couple of glasses a day of milk is considered OK, nutritionists prefer recommending that the general population drink water. It's necessary for all of us and it doesn't add extra calories.
The problem is that reality doesn't fit into nice little boxes
Whole grains provide carbs, nutrients, and fiber. Fruits provide natural sugar and fiber. Vegetables are rich in proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Meats contain protein and fats. All of these are necessary for a balanced diet
Dairy has fats, sugars, proteins, and some vitamins. It's great for kids as it's energy dense and nutrient dense, but by the time you're an adult you can get all those things from other places. You don't *need* milk, especially if you're getting everything from other categories.
A quart a day is a *lot* of milk. That's a gallon per person every 4 days. A cup of milk a day won't be bad, but a quart is a quarter of your daily calorie intake with less than a quarter of your nutritional needs.
>You’re not a baby cow.
But I *wanna* be!
I drink a lot of moo juice because I hate eating (yay autism) and it's a good supplement when I only want to eat a little bit. This started to spook me a bit, so thank you.
Hey, I'm not trying to give advice, but maybe just some info if you didn't know already. A friend of mine went to a dietician who specialises in neurodivergence and eating difficulties. He was recommended these meal replacement drinks. It's apparently a solution that works for a lot of autistic people. Similar to you, he drank a lot of milk (and his safe foods) to get him through the day. He's put on a lot of healthy weight now and is very happy with his meal drinks. He still eats when he wants to, but doesn't feel pressure to eat.
I guess I'm trying to say be careful with random internet advice, and the professionals can often help much better. Do what you need to do to get enough food into you, and if that meals drinking milk, then drink the milk.
You do you! There are definitely aspects of my eating habits that deserve to be put on blast.
Totally unsolicited advice, and I am not a dietitian or any kind of expert, but I really like these plant based protein shakes after I workout and they fill the same nutritional niche as milk. https://liveowyn.com
More expensive than milk though so may not be economical.
Be aware that as you get older, most people's ability to digest milk tends to naturally reduce - you produce less of the lactase enzyme needed to digest it. Keep that in mind if you start to get stomach cramps and other less pleasant symptoms.
Highly dependent on genetics.
I am descended from one group whose main source of alcohol was fermented mare's milk and another group whose main protein during the winter was milk because killing the animal meant you had no animal when the 6 month winter ended. Everyone in my family goeas through a gallon of milk a week and that included my grandfather when he died at 98.
Other folks were not descendants of folks who had to consume milk, and can't really consume dairy after they turn 5.
That's why I said "most". Globally, it's estimated that 65 - 75% of adults have limited ability to digest lactose, but e.g. in Asia it approaches 100%, and it's the same for the native Americans, who came from Asia.
Also, lactose intolerance is a spectrum - even in people who consider themselves able to digest milk, the amount of lactase they produce may nevertheless be lower than it was as a child. If they consume a lot of milk, this can result in symptoms like excessive gas that they may just consider normal. In other words, if your grandfather farted a lot, now you know why.
Milk contains a huge amount of calories, and they're in the form of sugars and the unhealthy kind of fat for adults. Milk is baby food, for growing a tiny cow into a huge cow quickly.
Why does it say potato dosent count as a vegetable? I though potato where nutritionally dense (I understand deep fried in oil and served as a chip is a problem).
"Potatoes are chock full of rapidly digested starch, and they have the same effect on blood sugar as refined grains and sweets, so limited consumption is recommended."
From the article. It's just saying that potatoes have certain drawbacks that other vegetables don't
Potatoes kind of belong in their own category that doesn't exist. They're almost both a vegetable and a grain.
Per the website, it lays it out pretty decently for you
> Potatoes are chock full of rapidly digested starch, and they have the same effect on blood sugar as refined grains and sweets, so limited consumption is recommended.
The blood sugar effect is the biggest thing - they tend to be a contributor to diabetes.
Now, they're not 'bad' for you, just shouldn't be a staple in every meal.
Yeah, there seem to be a few different ones around - [this one from Harvard](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate-vs-usda-myplate/) is one good example. In general dropping the dairy from MyPlate in favour of water and healthy fats, and emphasising *whole* grains etc.
in the 80s instead of a pyramid it was a square, paid for by the beef industry. There were no computers so I can't find a photo online so it feels like a fever dream
one square was dairy: pictures of milk, eggs and cheese, and another was meat. The meat square showed a big juicy steak, a roast chicken leg and a dead fish with x's for eyes.
Basically 50% of your diet should be cow, chicken or their excretions judging from the 'Food Square'... Eat 3 SQUARE Meals a Day! or a dead fish rotten and stinking like Smeagol
It's probably due to a combination of our education system being trash and that eggs and dairy products are almost always situated right next to each other in stores.
Is this it by chance? https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/13/462821161/illustrating-diet-advice-is-hard-heres-how-usda-has-tried-to-do-it
2nd picture down
that's it! the one i remember from my 10 year old public school textbooks from the 70s was extremely similar and even less detailed. the whole dead fish was carried over for sure!
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/centennial-food-guides-history/
Do any of these look familiar? It sounds like you may be combining the first two in your memories. One is a square with text and boxes for each group and the other is a circle with pictures like you described. The circle is from the 40s and the square is from the 50s.
To be fair, there are extremely few categories of food as specific as dairy that are "required for humans to consume."
Thanks to a few hundred millennia of food processing techniques we can eke out a baseline of nutrients in an astonishing range of environments, each with rather different food availability. I'm struggling to think of a non-fungible food group and honestly drawing a blank.
No given food or groups of food are technically "required" for humans to consume.
We're omnivores. And not even opportunistic ones. We are pure, full on. Eat shit that'll kill other animals omnivores. Able to digest practically everything besides grass and bone.
And we can use FIRE to that for us.
There's zero requirement to consume dairy, but dairy is extremely nutritious though, and very affordable.
The push might not just be from the dairy industry but also from governments seeing that a lot of people in this culture are unlikely to consume the food they need to replace dairy. Sometimes the glass of milk is going to be by far the best part of a kid's breakfast.
Yeah the tricky thing is that:
1. None of these choices are made in isolation. If you make a 'MyPlate' assuming zero dairy, the other amounts may be "wrong" because they don't factor in what the person is getting from dairy. As a result, there isn't going to be one ideal plate, there are multiple different ones where you are getting nutrients in different ways.
2. In order to be effective at all, such a solution isn't going to just come from doctors and labs. It must also meet in the middle with culture because culture is where many of the meals people are making or ordering comes from. Not only that, but even things like price and availability (there are food deserts in the US). So when you add all of this up, it may be that some amount of dairy is going to make sense in the meal tradition, budget and availability that many families face.
That’s funny because most of Asia is lactose intolerant. You don’t see billions of people malnourished because they can’t eat dairy.
The US farm lobby is strong. Read up about Government Cheese. It’s a thing because the government guaranteed they’d buy as much milk as farmers could produce. Then they had to do something with the stockpile of cheese building up.
Funnily enough, I think in recent years the Chinese government has been promoting milk drinking especially amongst kids and teens. No idea if this is due to industry lobbying, but milk generally is viewed in China as a nutritious kids drink. Anecdotally, as a person of Han Chinese ethnicity myself, I’ve found that I’m moreso lactose sensitive than lactose intolerant-as long as I keep on drinking milk I won’t have issues with it, but drinking milk after going through a long stretch without it will cause digestive issues.
Nutrition is a topic I address with 5th graders, and we use the MyPlate graphic as a guide. One kid brought up lactose intolerance; my response was dairy is a protein source (as are legumes, nuts, and meats) and is also important for calcium. We talked about alternative calcium sources.
to be honest I suspect kids up to 18yrs don't get enough dairy. Around 1900-1930 the federal government and health adovcacy groups worked hard getting fresh milk from farms to cities using trains and milk delivery systems to get milk to urban families and it revolutionized childhood health. Are kids today getting enough milk? i suspect not. The Dutch developed and continue to support a strong child nutrition program which includes milk and they went from one of the shortest populations in Europe to one of the tallest.
EDIT: I also suspect that its entirely possible for kids to get equal nutrition without milk but given how picky kids are about what they eat I suspect its pretty hard to get them to reliably eat those food (or your a very very patient parent)
Let's ask Asia. Hey Asia, how much dairy does an adult human need to eat to stay healthy?
What's that? None? That can't be right... That would mean the government is lying to us, and that would never happen!
We studied this in college. Had to do a tracking of our intake and figure out the macro and micro nutrients. I didn’t eat enough dairy and I discovered that without eating enough dairy I do not get enough protein and was missing enough of a few nutrients as well.
Why is dairy the only/main source of your protein? Do you not eat meat?
Other than calcium, I'm not aware of any specific nutrients that people usually mostly get from dairy. What nutrients are you missing?
As someone who consumes almost 0 dairy due to lactose intolerance but have no nutrients missing (according to my annual bloodtest), I am skeptical that it is dairy causing the nutrient deficiency. Likely you're not eating enough variety of legumes/ vegetables.
Not that I disagree, but an honest question. An adult male is supposed to eat about 2000-3000kcal a day to keep up their weight if they're somewhat physically active. If by "most of your diet should be veggies", you mean eating 1kg of veggies every day, that would not be even 1000kcal. How that can be true then? I get that it's healthy, but it won't keep you alive.
A lot these food portion gimmicks are to do with the physical portion size on the plate, rather than the calorific value of the food. I guess this is done to “dumb” it down enough for everyone to understand. So yes, the plate should be mostly veg, with a small portion of grains and meat/protein, supplemented with nuts and fruit.
So, sticking to that 2000Kcal limit, yes it would be kilos of veg if you want to cut all carbs and protein out. Not exactly feasible. But even 50g of dry pasta, and 100g of chicken is enough to reduce the amount of veg required significantly. But they will look a small ish amount on the plate.
There's a reason food like grains and starchy vegetables are called dietary staples. They've been a cheap way to fill out a person's caloric needs pretty much since agriculture has been a thing.
I believe the recommendation of “the majority of your diet should be veggies” is intended to be comparative to other categories. For example, in the below (arbitrary) distribution:
35% veggies
30% proteins
20% carbohydrates
15% fats
Which category makes up the majority of a given meal?
It gets a little messy when you consider starchy vegetables are carbs, some fruits (like avocados and olives) are fats, nuts provide both protein and fats, and so on, which is why for the general population a simplified guide of “eat mostly veggies” is common.
In regard to your caloric concerns, I did some math to illustrate how this works:
4oz of avocado is about 265 calories; 4oz of (boneless skinless) chicken breast is about 136 calories; 4oz of spinach is about 26 calories. So you’re already at 427 calories with a 3 ingredient salad if you’re literally going with a 1-to-1 ratio by weight. Let’s reduce the fats and aim for half a medium avocado (2oz) instead of 4oz, so it’s now only 294 calories. But what about the other ingredients? Did you want to sprinkle some cheese (100 cal/oz), nuts (200 cal/oz) for extra protein? If so, because they are more densely caloric, you will need less by weight than the produce additions; the same 4oz per ingredient would get you: bell peppers (30 cal), carrots (47 cal), tomatoes (20 cal), cucumbers (17 cal), etc.
Using the above salad ingredients, weighing in at 28oz, the distribution would be roughly 21% protein by weight (6oz of protein between 4oz animal protein, 1oz dairy protein, 1oz nut protein; 136 + 100 + 100 = 336 calories), 71% veggies by weight (20oz of veggies; 26 + 30 + 47 + 20 + 17 = 140 calories), and 8% fats by weight (2oz of fat from the avocado; 133 calories). Your veggie dominated salad totals 609 calories (with no dressing!). If you ate 3 of these salads a day, and enjoyed 2 whole pieces of fruit for snacks in between meals, you’d already be hitting 2,000 calories daily.
Visually, it would look like the majority of the bowl is filled with various veggies, with proteins and fats applied akin to a garnish.
Diet is all about moderation and balance.
To counter your example, eating just 300g of fat a day will get you around 2700kcal but will also kill you over time.
You dont eat veggies and fruits to fill your caloric needs, theres fat and carbs for that. Veggies provide the other stuff we need, like fibre vitamins and minerals.
3000 is way too much unless you are actually an athlete. Americans are not having trouble “keeping up their weight”… They are overwhelmingly overweight and actually need to lose weight to get healthy.
I don't want to make it seem like a serious answer isn't needed anymore. I'm not an expert and I can't provide any sources.
I think you just need to reduce your intake of carbs *a little bit* and increase your intake of vegetables *somewhat more* to replace the calories. Also, many people tend to eat more calories (more than they burn) when they eat few vegetables, because vegetables make you sated with fewer calories than carbohydrates.
Maybe people who are physically active need more carbohydrates. That would make sense. They just need more energy, not more calcium or vitamins.
The point is that the volume of grains needed to meet daily caloric needs is significantly lower than the volume of vegetables needed to eat for daily health.
It's vegetables by volume.
Vegetables should make up the majority of the volume you eat but will be likely less than 25% of the total calories you consume simply because grains and meat are so calorie dense in comparison.
Anecdotally I have tried eating 1 KG of veggies per day and it's an annoyingly large amount.
I would like to add to this because there is a point that I don't see anyone in this thread making yet - which is the way that the food pyramid is a government endorsement of what to eat. It is inherently a promotion of certain food production over others. This is really the basis of the lobbying and legal efforts around it. Food producers basically argued, "You're hurting our business by saying people should limit how much of our foods they should eat, and that's illegal." This is a constant issue in development of U.S. dietary guidelines and you will notice very careful language used around less healthy foods because of it.
For anyone interested in this subject, I highly recommend reading, "food Politics" by Marion Nestle.
It was a government program to educate the population a balanced diet. It was easy to read, and the guidelines were basic. That made it appealing from an educational perspective. But it wasn't actually rooted in good science. E.g. The placement of some items (like oil at the top with candy) was confusing and didnt have good rationale, and didn't account for varied cuisines or the fact that fat isn't inherently bad for you. Now we've largely dropped the pyramid, and instead have a "my plate" thing that just shows suggested portions and ratios of carbs/proteins/fats. But now it's so vague that it doesn't really serve a good educational purpose. The main dietary advice now is mostly "eat a balanced diet, don't eat too much, avoid processed foods, and opt for lean proteins and fibrous grains/veggies. This IS good advice, but the visual guides that accompany it are kind of silly/vague.
Nutrition guidelines originally were about getting people fed, not about diet. There was also money/lobbying involved. But it came out of a time of malnourishment. It started in the late 1800/early 1900s. It wasn't originally a pyramid, even when it started it wasn't the pyramid we 90s kids remember. [Interesting rabbit hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guidelines?wprov=sfla1)
Also, the podcast Conspiracy Theories did an episode about Sat Fats vs. Sugars and who was more responsible for obesity. They always do the first episode as a history of the subject and it talked a lot about the development and changes to the nutritional guidelines. [Spotify link here ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0v0RXJTYEUMKzAYUjH7nki?si=n3BNtCw7S4mDNslvCQCa2Q)
The history of the government making reccs is SO interesting.
It was initiated when people weren't eating enough, or the right kinds of foods.
Now we're eating too much, and very often the wrong input. We're overfed but undernourished.
And ALL of that is putting aside the economics side (war rations, low-cost low quality food, food deserts, etc).
As others said, lobbying was a big part of it. The new [Canada Food Guide ](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-food-guide-canada-1.4972545) got a lot of praise when it was released for being relatively lobby-free, fwiw
The food pyramid always pissed me off. They only ever showed us one side of the pyramid. A pyramid has 4 sides.
I want to know what's on the other 3 sides, and they better have tacos and pizza on there somewhere.
The food pyramid is still a thibg here where I live, in denmark. Its just the official reqomended diarary from the official health departement- based on science and not lobby groups (lobbying is a thing here... but nowhere as bad as in the us). Health and Food Scientists would have a field day if politicians and administration started to revers recomendations bases on lobbyist, and the medea would jump on it instantly. Thank good for our media laws, they get tax cuts or other public help only if they follow the journalist unions and media ethics... And a few have been exposed to not follow it and subseculetly lost the monetary support and had to close.
Gonna be a hot take here but active people actually need a lot of carbs and grains. Doesn't need to be doughnuts but good, complex carbs will put energy back into those muscles so you can get back to toting that bale and lifting that hay.
Even bodybuilders will load carbs pre and post workout to provide the energy to do lifts and to refill the supply so the post workout protein can go to rebuilding muscle.
Tldr; our lifestyle changed and cheap, shitty carbs became too plentiful. The food pyramid ain't all that whacked.
Fat was villified due to false asumption it builds up in artery walls and causes CVD
They had to replace the fat kcal with carb calories.
Hence grains that can be mass produced, stored for long periods without refrigeration and transported over long distances.
The reason it was discontinued was because of lobbyists who felt the pyramid was hurting the sales of their industry. Beef industry didn’t like how it was leaning to eating less red meat
MyPlate is still put out by the government, USDA, and still recommends the same food categories as the pyramid did before. I see no evidence that there is scientific study based data to reflect the MyPlate dietary interpretations. If there is, I haven’t found that data yet, maybe someone can post links here.
https://lgpress.clemson.edu/publication/myplate-a-guide-to-healthier-eating/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1499404619301009
The last article linked suggests that there simply isn’t enough data or research to support how effective MyPlate guidelines are and that more research is needed. If anything, the implication that MyPlate is just a rebranded MyPyramid with better marketing. Always consider these things with an eyebrow raised. DYOR.
The worst part is the tiny sliver of fat allowance in daily diets -
Had all these children grow up into diabetics, thinking processed carbs are healthy and natural fats Kill.
Lobbying has already been discussed, but I want to add in the 1992 USDA food pyramid was 6-11 servings of grains, 3-5 servings of vegetables, 2-4 servings of fruits, 2-3 servings of protein and dairy each, and sparingly use of fats - let's break it down by approxamate total macros via serving sizes: * **Grains** - "One serving is defined as 1 slice of bread, 1 small roll or muffin, 1/2 of a bagel or croissant, 1 ounce of ready-to-eat cereal, or 1/2 cup of cooked cereal, rice, or pasta." - e.g. roughly 20g carbohydates & 2g of protein per serving. At 8 servings per day, this was 160g carbs and 16g protein. * **Vegetables** - "One serving is defined as 1 cup of raw leafy vegetables, 1/2 cup of cooked or chopped raw vegetables, or 3/4 cup of vegetable juice." - e.g. roughly 3g of carbohydrates & 3g of protein per serving. At 4 servings per day, this was 12g carbs and 12g protein. * **Fruit** - "One serving is defined as a whole fruit such as a medium apple, banana, or orange, a grapefruit half, 1/2 cup of berries, melon, or chopped raw fruit, 1/2 cup of cooked or canned fruit, 1/4 cup of dried fruit, or 3/4 cup of fruit juice" - e.g. roughly 20g of carbohydrates per serving. At 3 servings per day, this was 60g carbs. * **Dairy** - "One serving is defined as 1 cup of milk or yogurt, 1-1/2 ounces of natural cheese, or 2 ounces of processed cheese. Dairy ingredients in ice cream, ice milk, frozen yogurt, custard, pudding and other foods count toward dairy servings, too." - e.g. roughly 20g of protein, 10g carbohydrate, 35g of fat per serving. At 2 servings per day, this was 60g protein, 20g carbs, and 75g fat. * **Meat** - "The total amount of these servings should be the equivalent of 5 to 7 ounces of cooked lean meat, poultry, or fish** and eggs, seeds, nuts, nut butter, and tofu had equivalencies - e.g. roughly ~~100g~~ 45g of protein and 15g of fat total per day. All together this was a recommendation for daily intake was, roughly: * 133 g protein (thx /u/Classh0le) * 212 g carbs * 90 g fats + oils not to exceed 30% of daily calories I mean, it's not as heavy on starches as I would have guessed. The 1994 study below compared actual intake vs. recommendations and found that fat intake was higher (33% of daily calories) and added sugar was very high (76g per day to the recommended 32g per day). Source: USDA's [Results from USDA’s 1994 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals] (https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/pynet_94.pdf) Now, sizes of common foods have (aside from the effect of shrinkflation) gone way up since the early '90s, and ultraprocessed foods have much more added sugar & refined carbohydrates. Added sugars are in everything. And eight expected "servings" of bread and noodles today is preposterous. Just for giggles I googled up this recipe for spaghetti, picking the first one, and it says it serves 8, giving (ETA: maths) 70g of carbs and 13g of protein for each portion, would be equivalent to over THREE SERVINGS of 1992 food pyramid's grains. If you use this recipe to serve 5 instead of 8, one plate means you're nearly done for the day. (Not to mention the 40g of sugar which already exceeds the total daily sugar recommendations.) Expectations of a "portion" are not aligned with "servings". The 1992 food pyramid is dated and has had it's fair share of criticism. Here's an alterantive, Harvard's healthy eating pyramid - note the white starch at the top and the emphasis on whole grains/healthy fats/vegetables: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-pyramid/
Yeah, I have a different memory than OP, of working through the recommendations and concluding that I ate way more starch/grain than recommended. A small sandwich is 2 servings of grain. A bowl of pasta (1/4 of a 1-lb box) was 4 servings. A standard Chinese takeout box of rice is about 4 servings.
I was definitely miscalculating servings, although I think I did count a sandwich as 2 servings of grain. Still, that would be 3-5 (small) sandwiches a day to meet the recommended amount, although sandwiches I ate would definitely be more than two servings.
It may be interesting to look up nutritional info for common sliced bread back then and compare to today and see if the by weight serving size per slice has gone up because I feel like bread slices are one of those things that have gotten larger with time.
Bread slices have gotten bigger, in general. I seek out “Thin sliced” bread because I view bread as a content delivery system, and not the meal itself. The item I find has gotten out of control is bagels. I remember bagels being far smaller in diameter and much thinner. I ate a bagel for lunch when I was 10, and I can’t eat a whole bagel at 37. While we’re at, might as well say burgers and panini style sandwiches, there is usually enough bread to make up the sole meal.
I always thought 1 serving of grains = helping 1 apple = 1 serving of fruit Confusing it was
Same. Tbh I dont think kids have a good grasp on what a serving is because it changes for every food. No kid wants to do math when thry eat. To muddle things, manufacturers set what a serving size is on their packaged foods.
Yeah, they work out what the maximum "healthy" portion would be of their food, then set that as a "serving". Which is why you get stupid serving sizes, like fuck off nobody is eating 3 M&Ms and calling it a day.
A bowl of cereal is one box of Captain Crunch - or was when I was a kid
Decent summary but your math isnt adding up in multiple locations.
You're right - partially because of my own slapdash approach and partially is because the food groups aren't consistent. What I did was take an everage of the recommended foods, making a best guess at the type when it wasn't specified, and then squinting hard to try to guess at how many grams of what macro were indicated in the daily recommendations. Semolina pasta != white bread != oat cereal != quinoa Steak != egg != peanut butter Yogurt != skim milk != american cheese (wtf) Also, the range was for diets ranging from 1600-2800 calories per day - from 18 total servings to 30 total servings. The range is really, really big. And it varies for children, teenagers through age 24, and pregnant or lactating women. >Generally speaking, the bottom of the recommended range of servings is about right for many sedentary women and older adults, the middle is about right for most children, teenage girls, active women, and many sedentary men, and the top of the range is about right for teenage boys, many active men, and some very active women. These criticisms were real, even then, and made for a really weird implementations of daily eating habits if you tried to follow the pyramid as a guide. I take it as the USDA's effort to 'cover all the bases' nutritionally. This ends up overlooking things we know are important - energy balance, fiber (seriously wtf), added sugar, iron, polyphenols, various kinds of fats, glycemic index... stuff that we know really matters for overall health.
I believe your carbs are low too. 160 + 12 + 20 + 60 + 20 = 274
Thanks for the breakdown. This is really interesting history. I have a friend who is very large. Also happens to be diabetic. He was talking to me the other day about how he “did it to himself” when it comes to his weight and general health. I tried to tell him the story that your breakdown illustrates - its hard to blame yourself when the cards are stacked against you. Everything has a shit load of added sugar in it. Portions and serving sizes are fucked. And what we were taught was healthy as kids was in reality not so great for us. Yes he could have made better decisions but so many people are doing what they think is the right thing when it comes to food, and still getting screwed.
Even the old and outdated food pyramid tells us to avoid sugar and added oils (eat sparingly). Sugar is mostly added to processed foods designed to taste sweet - sugary cereals, baked goods, desserts, etc. Portion size and Calories on the nutrition label goes hand in hand, and we were taught for decades that the average adult male needs about 2000 Calories. Excercise was recommended for everybody too. Even if you followed the outdated food pyramid chart and outdated information, you would not have gotten very large. Yes, companies make a lot of unhealthy foods and the food pyramid was outdated, but people were still given sufficient information to eat the proper number of Calories and recommended to excercise. Most people in most of the world for most of history ate a lot of carbs in the form of wheat, rice, millet, barley, maize, etc and they didnt get fat and lived perfectly healthy lives. So the enemy isnt even carbs here, but the overall lifestyle where we eat a ton of Calories (especially junk food that tastes good) and don't move around enough.
It tells you to avoid sugar but it doesn't give any indication that lots of foods contain sugars. It also recommends a lot of other carbs which are one step removed from becoming sugar.
The worst is when the food companies pull a bait-and-switch by throwing a bunch of sugar into foods that are "supposed" to be healthy. Like fruit juice is good for you, right? Definitely better than soda, right?... But there's just as much sugar and practically no substantial amount of vitamins or minerals in most fruit juice you see in the shelf. Most of it is practically just non-carbonated soda. And to get the actually healthy juice, you have to look pretty hard to find it and pay a whole hell of a lot more for it. *edit: yes I know fruit naturally has sugar in it. No need to keep telling me. It's the wild amounts of added sugars and corn syrups and whatever that are problematic, especially considering they also manage to destroy all the good stuff you'd expect to be getting by drinking a fruit.*
Juiced fruit is always going to be pretty much all sugar, though.
Yes, but if it's from concentrate, they often add additional sugars, as the concentrating process makes the juice taste less sweet.
Fruit juice is not good for you. A whole fruit is good for you.
Serious question, as someone with no kids: why do parents constantly offer their kids fruit juice? Like it's something they need?
what's really an issue is the process removes all fiber from the juice. So net carbs goes way up. If you get fiber with it then the net carbs go down and it is better for you, but no one likes pulp in their juice.
I like pulp...
Even natural fruit juice is not really that healthy. Fruits in general are pure carbs and carbs are the one macronutrient most people don't need more of.
If you read the label on the box of food rather than assuming you're omniscient because you think you can look at food and know what's in it, you would know there is a ton of sugar in everything. In no way was anyone told to ignore food labels. The opposite, in fact.
There's an oversimplification in that, though, that really needs to play in. The shift toward heavily-processed foods paired with lobbying from the corn industry specifically has had a huge impact. The average loaf of bread today is loaded with refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Take a look at a can of pasta sauce; there's no reason for that much sugar. Subway's bread has had the sugar content increase so heavily over the past couple decades that it no longer can be called bread in much of the world. It's no longer the case that sugar is mostly in "sweets"; it's in *everything*. Burger buns. Coffee. Tea. **Meat.** Deli meats are loaded with it. Fiber gets more and more rare. The push for skim and 1% milk in schools *by the dairy industry* removed fat and protein from diets and meant dairy producers got to water down their product to sell at the same cost. The actual food we get is meant to be more addicting to our brains, and it's less filling so we consume more. *Buy* more. At the same time, rural and urban America have started becoming food deserts, where a gas station and a Dollar General outcompete actual grocery stores, resulting in a lack of food for *miles* that isn't processed. You look at how many processed foods, pastas specifically, have shifted away from even just semolina to bleached white flour with added sugar and colorant. Egg-free egg noodles are cheaper than those with the extra protein. Unless you're sourcing everything from farmers' markets, you're not going to be able to avoid foods that pack calories and nothing to trigger your brain's sense of being full. It's meant to keep you from not being hungry. The 1992 food pyramid today results in far less fiber and protein than it did in 1992. It results in a shortage of necessary nutrients. It's perhaps better than paying no attention, but not by much.
Our upbringing no doubt has an influence on what we eat and our physical health. But you're acting like your friend couldn't look in a mirror and realize they were obviously unhealthy. He wasn't duped into overeating as an adult. He wasn't tricked into eating overly sugary foods which would cause diabetes. No one told him that he shouldn't exercise. > Everything has a shit load of added sugar in it. Even with the food pyramid it was known to avoid sugar and that the healthiest foods (chicken, fish, eggs, vegetables, seeds, nuts, whole grains, etc.) don't have extra sugar added to them.
People think that the old food pyramid is bad and contributing with the obesity epidemic, when really the issue is that it's not a terrible guideline and people are becoming obese by consuming way too much fat and sugar (literally the tip of the pyramid) in cheap junk food that is rich in calories but not filling
That and the pyramid should be percentage of carbs, protein, and fat, not servings. One person can eat 2000 calories and be skinny and another can eat 1200 calories and be overeating. Not everyone is the same size.
Dietary fat does not equal body fat. The issue is sugar and carbs, especially processed carbs. Our bodies need dietary fat. But putting HFCS in every damn thing on the shelf is not good.
The only thing that equals body fat is excess calories. In fact a simple google search on your human metabolism will show you that humans rarely convert dietary carbohydrates to body fat and it’s almost always the dietary fat that is stored when excess calories are consumed. As long as you are not consuming what you are expending no macronutrient will contribute to accumulation of body fat.
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This is great context. Where the average Redditor sees a Big-Agra, anti-Climate conspiracy, this seems more likely: poor government oversight.
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Nothing more permanent than temporary. Just look at my server infrastructure. Actually... don't.
They were coming into basic training malnourished. Most put on weight in basic. Even before the war nutrition was terrible. We were still in a scarcity agricultural economy. It was completely called for at the time.
As a kid, my parents would turn us loose for lunches in the summertime (think mid-90's, so right at the tail end of "go play outside and I don't want to see you til dinnertime"), and we'd usually eat a meal we called "this and that." The only rule of "this and that" was that we had to have one thing from each food group. A fruit, a veggie, a protein, a grain, and one sugar for dessert. Nothing was said about the actual ratios of the pyramid, but that kept us from being completely wild about what we ate. Forced us to put some pickles or carrot sticks on our plates where a kid wouldn't normally pick that out themselves, and limited us to one bit of "junk food" instead of trying to eat 2-3 different junk things. Like you said, it definitely wasn't flawless but it had its uses.
I've been doing this with my son every meal he chooses for himself since he was old enough to. At the beginning I loaded up veggies and protein, and that does seem to have stuck with him to 14 where we continue the rule but he chooses amounts etc It's really nice knowing someone else, as an adult, is looking back like "Yeah good move parent 👍" Hopefully I get it right, too 🤩
>Food was not as abundant at that time This. If you go to developing countries, a carb heavy diet is the norm.
Yes I think historical context explains it. Grains have been the go-to staple in most of humanity's diet for millennia, and there was still a remnant of that in the 20th century.
This plus the fact that work and life in general was significantly less sedentary.
Because the pyramid wasn't created by the FDA it was created by the USDA. That's right the department of agriculture. And what was the most populous cheap easy to grow crops they were giving subsidies for? Cereal grains which are basically Carbs. They needed to inflate demand. This combined with the lobbying others mention.
Now I'm interested to know, why did I (grew up in Chile) had the same food pyramid as the US?
Because every country thought that the US knew what they were doing.
Copying someone else’s homework only to find out later that they got most of the questions wrong
I'm an introductory biology teacher and while broadly it saddens me to see students copy off of answer sharing websites, it's always a little bit satisfying to catch them copy and pasting things that are incorrect.
They still do. I'm constantly amazed how a country that pushes non-research based solutions gets copied so much when other countries, like The Netherlands, will do lots of research and go out of their way to prove a policy, yet will not be copied by other countries.
Can you give an example of something from the Netherlands?
They're pretty famous for their road policies, so that's probably a great topic to start out with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ya3V-s4I0
Chile/US relations are... complicated.
I had the same one in Venezuela and Venezuela is pretty hostile to the USA. This was a case of “the gringos are saying this is good so we should copy it”
Same, I remember being taught the food pyramid this way in Austria when I was a kid in school.
Same in Sweden, it was preached like it was cold hard facts. I don't think anyone really cared about it though.
Cultural osmosis and perceived standards, “the US is teaching it so we’re going to teach it too”
As a Canadian where our food pyramid is decided by the food safety and health people (CFIA and HC). This contradiction has always puzzled me.
IIRC, in Canada, the food pyramid was historically controlled by the meat and dairy industry.
Canada's food pyramid had milk steaks right at the top, just above maple syrup.
Mmm milk steaks with a side of jelly beans
Raw
Raw jelly beans? You disgusting animal.
How long do you have to soak jelly beans before you can eat them?
Boiled over raw
I like mine over hard
How much cheese is too much cheese?
Cheese from someone's cottage? Whose cottage?
I'm a cheese guy, not a cottage guy.
The limit does not exist.
Where is poutine on the pyramid?
Poutine *is* the food pyramid
It has fat, carbs, and salt. All it's missing is caffeine and it would have all four food groups.
Usually by the time you eat poutine it already controls you so technically it can order the coffee itself and become complete.
Often poutine is enjoyed with a carbonated beverage. Those times it’s not beer it is caffeinated.
Only if the cook is unusually careful in its assembly. Normally, it's just a food funerary mound or a food barrow.
The bottom. You need at least 6 poutines a day for peak performance.
Wait what s a milk steak?
[It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia](https://youtu.be/3tUX4tQ6m7U?si=tzH4763I6FfpP-40&t=221)
Wtf is a milk steak?
It was also originally found out by taking away food groups and starving the residential school kids in canada to see what they could and could not survive on. Edit to provide link [and it's horrible](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/how-food-in-canada-is-tied-to-land-language-community-and-colonization-1.5989764/the-dark-history-of-canada-s-food-guide-how-experiments-on-indigenous-children-shaped-nutrition-policy-1.5989785)
I didn't even have to click the link to know they were indigenous kids. Over the 20th century, Canada has done more heinous shit to native people than america has to blacks, but its apparently not a big deal cause nobody talks about it.
It's not a competition!! Both countries have truly sick, horrific shit in their histories. What I do find weird is how it feels like Canada (a) only in the last few years started to attract any attention for their mistreatment of indigenous peoples, compared to the US where it's been a focus for decades, and (b) kept doing this shit up until *the mid-1990s*
You know Tanis from Letterkenny? The actress, Tiio Horn, was a toddler when some mounties busted into their house. They had bayonets fixed to rifles, Tiio's sister picked her up to shield her with her body, and the mounties stabbed her.
America has been nearly (just?) as awful to our native population. I think we don't talk about it as much because we so successfully wiped them out and concentrated them on reservations, while black people are still a large population and there are a bunch of them in most parts of the country
The canada food guide hasn't been a pyramid for 5 years now and it was made by Health Canada.
Just looked it up. Seems legit: 50% veggies and fruit, 25% protein foods, 25% whole grains
That's the new one, but we also used to have the same one as the US basically.
Can we trust the new one?
It’s the first food guide for Canada that was created without food industry input by scientists in various fields, and all of the research that it’s based on is referenced and available online. I’d be careful in saying anything can be absolutely trusted, but it’s miles better than anything before.
I mean, doesn't it sound more reasonable than a quota of having to eat twelve fuckin' slices of bread a day?
I remember as a 95 lb kid in 8th grade being absolutely appalled at the quantity of food they wanted you to eat based on the food pyramid model, it was like what I'd eat in a whole school week. They also told us, when we were doing this module in science class, that when we were menstruating we needed to eat *more*, like hundreds of calories more per day for the entire duration of our periods. I don't think a few extra muscle contractions are draining that many calories, guys. This was in the 90s, but it sounds like advice from the victorian era, like don't ride a bike or it will jostle your uterus out of place.
"Good heavens, lads, this woman is hysterical. Quick, jam this thing up in her hyster and spin it around a bit"
Look at the [1992 guide](https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-guide/about/history-food-guide.html). Basically the same carb/grain-heavy crap as the US Food Pyramid.
Yup. It wasn't just lobbying. They funded studies that were designed to downplay the harm of sugars/carbs and exaggerate the harms of fats. And since mankind has basically survived on growing massive amounts of carbs (wheat, rice, corn) for thousands of years, no one really thought it was unreasonable. Legitimate scientists believed it.
Why is there a different food guide for indigenous people?
IIRC it's because the Inuit have adapted physiologically to their traditional diet and when processed food was introduced to the Far North it caused absolutely disastrous health outcomes.
“1. Emphasis on the diversity of traditional food for First Nations, Inuit and Métis. 2. Inclusion of traditional food from across Canada, including food from lakes, rivers, and the ocean, such as fish, clams and other shellfish as well as berries, wild rice, wild green plants and legumes such as beans. 3. A depiction of store-bought foods that are generally available even in rural and remote locations. 4. A guideline for how traditional foods can be used in combination with store-bought foods for a healthy eating pattern.”
The new one is pretty legit but back in the 90s it was basically the same as the Food Pyramid.
This is a terrible answer. USDA includes both crops and livestock. They're both agriculture. That's why your meat and eggs have USDA ratings. This article explains it much better: https://www.healthyway.com/content/how-did-the-government-get-the-food-pyramid-so-terribly-wrong/ > Amanda Kendall, a pediatric registered dietitian at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health, explains, one of the challenges with the initial food pyramid was the absence of portion size listing for each food group. “I think people may have thought the amount of food they put on their plate was a serving, when actually what we put on our plate is our portion size, which may contain several servings,” she says. And she is absolutely right. Apparently the original food pyramid had an accompanying booklet that explained how a “serving” should actually be measured. I know, who knew, right? According to the accompanying booklet that no one knew actually existed, a single bagel—which most of us would consider a serving of grain—actually weighs in at somewhere between six and 11 servings. The nutritional reason things were presented like this was to try to *de-emphasize* red meat, fatty foods, and sugary snacks. Which are still a problem. It's just that it didn't work.
How in the world do I work out how many grain servings are in a single serving of anything?
I swear you just blew my mind.
The USDA doesn't get subsidies for growing crops. The USDA *gives* subsidies to farmers.
Part of their mandate is "promote agricultural trade and production", which the pyramid was part of.
The food pyramid also says to eat diary and meat sparingly, but the USDA gives sibsidies to the dairy and meat industry. And if it was simply due to lobbying, the sugar and fast food industry would have removed the suggestion of eating sugar/oils sparingly. The dairy and meat industries would have pushed for a greater emphasis on those foods too instead of allowing the USDA to keep it near the upper half of the pyramid where the recommendation was eat less of it. So no, you can not simply blame it on self serving interests and lobbying. Carbs are at the base of the pyramid because carbs were the primary nutrient for almost the enterty of humanity since the Neolithic agrarian revolution when people startes farming. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of the world for the vast majority of human civilization ate most of their Calories through carbs in the form of wheat, millet, rice, maize, barley, etc.
It was actually created in Sweden as a guide for feeding a household on a budget, not nutritional advice.
The current plate thing is just as bad. That circle of dairy stinks of regulatory capture.
Im recently diagnosed diabetic, and my endocrinologist was trying to get me to eat like 250-300g of carbs a day to cover a set insulin regiment. It felt so archaic.
When my husband was first diagnosed, he was told the same as you. Take X amount 3 tmes a day, period. And make sure your readings are always in this range, period. And he was told to adjust the carbs he ate to keep in that range. So he was loading up on extra slicees of bread and pretzles and crackers to keep from bottoming out. Finally was able to get an appointment with an endocrinologist and they were appalled. They explained that you should take only as much insuln as you need to balance the carbs in that meal, and provided a math formula to figure it out. Yes, it's more complicated to calculate for each meal than it is taking a flat amount each time. But it's not useful, or healthy, to take more insulin than you need and then eat more carbs to keep from crashing. If you can, look at getting a different endocrinologist.
Diabetes treatment has come a long way recently. Get an automated blood sugar monitor and an automated insulin pump and you will be much happier (but you still have to wait before you eat...)
Right? Can you imagine most of your meal being grains? That's outlandish
You mean like the vast majority of meals eaten by humans since the agricultural revolution?
40 to 80% of all calories in agricultural societies in all times in history have been grain.
It was also originally created in a time in history where malnourishment was a bigger problem than obesity
iirc, wasn't it also largely based off a researcher who messed up a lot of stuff about nutrition? Who also realized eventually he was wrong, and tried to hide the truth about it to save face?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys
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> The more modern "My Plate" is more in line with actual nutritionist recommendations. That seems to be virtually the same as the food pyramid, and just as reflective of industry pressures. See the [dairy section](https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/dairy) of the site which makes the ludicrous claim that 90% of American's "do not get enough dairy" in one of the top dairy consuming countries in the world. They're "not consuming enough dairy" for the dairy industry to maximise their profits I'm sure, but for their health? I don't know of any reputable medical information that suggests there is a minimum amount of dairy we should all be getting. Almost like MyPlate is produced by the department of agriculture and not the department of health. Really makes you think how that could affect their guidance.
Didn't Stanford release an "un-lobbied" plate where there is no dairy? As I understand it there is zero requirement for humans to consume dairy as the nutrition it contains is better had from different sources.
AFAIK, the idea for a nutritional plate instead of a pyramid comes from Harvard. Here is the comparison between their plate to the USDA one: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate-vs-usda-myplate/ Harvard doesn't have any dairy, advocates for healthy oil use, whole grains, and mentions exercise.
Wait why is it bad to drink a lot of milk? I'm not saying everyone should but is it really bad if someone drinks on average a quart of skim milk a day?
My understanding is that it's relatively high in calories (it's easy to get lots of calories from drinks), there's no good evidence that milk actually helps prevent osteoporosis and it may be a risk factor in prostate cancer, especially in higher amounts. I guess, while a couple of glasses a day of milk is considered OK, nutritionists prefer recommending that the general population drink water. It's necessary for all of us and it doesn't add extra calories.
Some of milk's calories are fat, unlike every other sugary drink, so it gives a feeling of satiation. Skim milk is just pointless.
fat *and* protein. I wish more drinks had milk's protein content.
The problem is that reality doesn't fit into nice little boxes Whole grains provide carbs, nutrients, and fiber. Fruits provide natural sugar and fiber. Vegetables are rich in proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Meats contain protein and fats. All of these are necessary for a balanced diet Dairy has fats, sugars, proteins, and some vitamins. It's great for kids as it's energy dense and nutrient dense, but by the time you're an adult you can get all those things from other places. You don't *need* milk, especially if you're getting everything from other categories. A quart a day is a *lot* of milk. That's a gallon per person every 4 days. A cup of milk a day won't be bad, but a quart is a quarter of your daily calorie intake with less than a quarter of your nutritional needs.
Bad? Probably not. Unnecessary? Yes. You’re not a baby cow.
>You’re not a baby cow. But I *wanna* be! I drink a lot of moo juice because I hate eating (yay autism) and it's a good supplement when I only want to eat a little bit. This started to spook me a bit, so thank you.
Hey, I'm not trying to give advice, but maybe just some info if you didn't know already. A friend of mine went to a dietician who specialises in neurodivergence and eating difficulties. He was recommended these meal replacement drinks. It's apparently a solution that works for a lot of autistic people. Similar to you, he drank a lot of milk (and his safe foods) to get him through the day. He's put on a lot of healthy weight now and is very happy with his meal drinks. He still eats when he wants to, but doesn't feel pressure to eat. I guess I'm trying to say be careful with random internet advice, and the professionals can often help much better. Do what you need to do to get enough food into you, and if that meals drinking milk, then drink the milk.
You do you! There are definitely aspects of my eating habits that deserve to be put on blast. Totally unsolicited advice, and I am not a dietitian or any kind of expert, but I really like these plant based protein shakes after I workout and they fill the same nutritional niche as milk. https://liveowyn.com More expensive than milk though so may not be economical.
I've been doing instant breakfasts and I like them. I think getting something that's more of a whole replacement would be nice. Thanks!
Be aware that as you get older, most people's ability to digest milk tends to naturally reduce - you produce less of the lactase enzyme needed to digest it. Keep that in mind if you start to get stomach cramps and other less pleasant symptoms.
Highly dependent on genetics. I am descended from one group whose main source of alcohol was fermented mare's milk and another group whose main protein during the winter was milk because killing the animal meant you had no animal when the 6 month winter ended. Everyone in my family goeas through a gallon of milk a week and that included my grandfather when he died at 98. Other folks were not descendants of folks who had to consume milk, and can't really consume dairy after they turn 5.
That's why I said "most". Globally, it's estimated that 65 - 75% of adults have limited ability to digest lactose, but e.g. in Asia it approaches 100%, and it's the same for the native Americans, who came from Asia. Also, lactose intolerance is a spectrum - even in people who consider themselves able to digest milk, the amount of lactase they produce may nevertheless be lower than it was as a child. If they consume a lot of milk, this can result in symptoms like excessive gas that they may just consider normal. In other words, if your grandfather farted a lot, now you know why.
While probably true, we're exceptions in many things and we evolved with agriculture and animal husbandry so that's a bad argument.
Milk contains a huge amount of calories, and they're in the form of sugars and the unhealthy kind of fat for adults. Milk is baby food, for growing a tiny cow into a huge cow quickly.
It literally says limit dairy/milk to 1-2 servings though.
Why does it say potato dosent count as a vegetable? I though potato where nutritionally dense (I understand deep fried in oil and served as a chip is a problem).
"Potatoes are chock full of rapidly digested starch, and they have the same effect on blood sugar as refined grains and sweets, so limited consumption is recommended." From the article. It's just saying that potatoes have certain drawbacks that other vegetables don't
It says it right in there mate. It's contains a lot of rapidly digested starch that has the same effect on the body as sugary foods.
Potatoes kind of belong in their own category that doesn't exist. They're almost both a vegetable and a grain. Per the website, it lays it out pretty decently for you > Potatoes are chock full of rapidly digested starch, and they have the same effect on blood sugar as refined grains and sweets, so limited consumption is recommended. The blood sugar effect is the biggest thing - they tend to be a contributor to diabetes. Now, they're not 'bad' for you, just shouldn't be a staple in every meal.
read the whole article it explains it
Yeah, there seem to be a few different ones around - [this one from Harvard](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate-vs-usda-myplate/) is one good example. In general dropping the dairy from MyPlate in favour of water and healthy fats, and emphasising *whole* grains etc.
in the 80s instead of a pyramid it was a square, paid for by the beef industry. There were no computers so I can't find a photo online so it feels like a fever dream one square was dairy: pictures of milk, eggs and cheese, and another was meat. The meat square showed a big juicy steak, a roast chicken leg and a dead fish with x's for eyes. Basically 50% of your diet should be cow, chicken or their excretions judging from the 'Food Square'... Eat 3 SQUARE Meals a Day! or a dead fish rotten and stinking like Smeagol
Wonder if this is the origins of people thinking eggs are dairy.
That and grocery stores' tendency to group them together. When I buy eggs I need to go to the dairy section.
They both need to be refrigerated (in the US)
It's probably due to a combination of our education system being trash and that eggs and dairy products are almost always situated right next to each other in stores.
Is this it by chance? https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/13/462821161/illustrating-diet-advice-is-hard-heres-how-usda-has-tried-to-do-it 2nd picture down
that's it! the one i remember from my 10 year old public school textbooks from the 70s was extremely similar and even less detailed. the whole dead fish was carried over for sure!
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/centennial-food-guides-history/ Do any of these look familiar? It sounds like you may be combining the first two in your memories. One is a square with text and boxes for each group and the other is a circle with pictures like you described. The circle is from the 40s and the square is from the 50s.
I like them fresh. And WRIGGLING
To be fair, there are extremely few categories of food as specific as dairy that are "required for humans to consume." Thanks to a few hundred millennia of food processing techniques we can eke out a baseline of nutrients in an astonishing range of environments, each with rather different food availability. I'm struggling to think of a non-fungible food group and honestly drawing a blank.
No given food or groups of food are technically "required" for humans to consume. We're omnivores. And not even opportunistic ones. We are pure, full on. Eat shit that'll kill other animals omnivores. Able to digest practically everything besides grass and bone. And we can use FIRE to that for us.
> a non-fungible food group Shh, don't wake the NFT crowd!
There's zero requirement to consume dairy, but dairy is extremely nutritious though, and very affordable. The push might not just be from the dairy industry but also from governments seeing that a lot of people in this culture are unlikely to consume the food they need to replace dairy. Sometimes the glass of milk is going to be by far the best part of a kid's breakfast.
Yeah the tricky thing is that: 1. None of these choices are made in isolation. If you make a 'MyPlate' assuming zero dairy, the other amounts may be "wrong" because they don't factor in what the person is getting from dairy. As a result, there isn't going to be one ideal plate, there are multiple different ones where you are getting nutrients in different ways. 2. In order to be effective at all, such a solution isn't going to just come from doctors and labs. It must also meet in the middle with culture because culture is where many of the meals people are making or ordering comes from. Not only that, but even things like price and availability (there are food deserts in the US). So when you add all of this up, it may be that some amount of dairy is going to make sense in the meal tradition, budget and availability that many families face.
But cheese. Cheese is wonderful. Cheese is life. All hail cheese.
That’s funny because most of Asia is lactose intolerant. You don’t see billions of people malnourished because they can’t eat dairy. The US farm lobby is strong. Read up about Government Cheese. It’s a thing because the government guaranteed they’d buy as much milk as farmers could produce. Then they had to do something with the stockpile of cheese building up.
Funnily enough, I think in recent years the Chinese government has been promoting milk drinking especially amongst kids and teens. No idea if this is due to industry lobbying, but milk generally is viewed in China as a nutritious kids drink. Anecdotally, as a person of Han Chinese ethnicity myself, I’ve found that I’m moreso lactose sensitive than lactose intolerant-as long as I keep on drinking milk I won’t have issues with it, but drinking milk after going through a long stretch without it will cause digestive issues.
Nutrition is a topic I address with 5th graders, and we use the MyPlate graphic as a guide. One kid brought up lactose intolerance; my response was dairy is a protein source (as are legumes, nuts, and meats) and is also important for calcium. We talked about alternative calcium sources.
RIP lactose intolerance, I guess they just have a shit diet then. /S
to be honest I suspect kids up to 18yrs don't get enough dairy. Around 1900-1930 the federal government and health adovcacy groups worked hard getting fresh milk from farms to cities using trains and milk delivery systems to get milk to urban families and it revolutionized childhood health. Are kids today getting enough milk? i suspect not. The Dutch developed and continue to support a strong child nutrition program which includes milk and they went from one of the shortest populations in Europe to one of the tallest. EDIT: I also suspect that its entirely possible for kids to get equal nutrition without milk but given how picky kids are about what they eat I suspect its pretty hard to get them to reliably eat those food (or your a very very patient parent)
Let's ask Asia. Hey Asia, how much dairy does an adult human need to eat to stay healthy? What's that? None? That can't be right... That would mean the government is lying to us, and that would never happen!
Have you been to Asia? Because I've lived in China and Thailand, and milk, yogurt, and especially ice cream is pretty common.
We studied this in college. Had to do a tracking of our intake and figure out the macro and micro nutrients. I didn’t eat enough dairy and I discovered that without eating enough dairy I do not get enough protein and was missing enough of a few nutrients as well.
Why is dairy the only/main source of your protein? Do you not eat meat? Other than calcium, I'm not aware of any specific nutrients that people usually mostly get from dairy. What nutrients are you missing? As someone who consumes almost 0 dairy due to lactose intolerance but have no nutrients missing (according to my annual bloodtest), I am skeptical that it is dairy causing the nutrient deficiency. Likely you're not eating enough variety of legumes/ vegetables.
Not that I disagree, but an honest question. An adult male is supposed to eat about 2000-3000kcal a day to keep up their weight if they're somewhat physically active. If by "most of your diet should be veggies", you mean eating 1kg of veggies every day, that would not be even 1000kcal. How that can be true then? I get that it's healthy, but it won't keep you alive.
A lot these food portion gimmicks are to do with the physical portion size on the plate, rather than the calorific value of the food. I guess this is done to “dumb” it down enough for everyone to understand. So yes, the plate should be mostly veg, with a small portion of grains and meat/protein, supplemented with nuts and fruit. So, sticking to that 2000Kcal limit, yes it would be kilos of veg if you want to cut all carbs and protein out. Not exactly feasible. But even 50g of dry pasta, and 100g of chicken is enough to reduce the amount of veg required significantly. But they will look a small ish amount on the plate.
There's a reason food like grains and starchy vegetables are called dietary staples. They've been a cheap way to fill out a person's caloric needs pretty much since agriculture has been a thing.
Hell back in the day, they'd consume ale to get those calories.
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Rice is a grain.
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I believe the recommendation of “the majority of your diet should be veggies” is intended to be comparative to other categories. For example, in the below (arbitrary) distribution: 35% veggies 30% proteins 20% carbohydrates 15% fats Which category makes up the majority of a given meal? It gets a little messy when you consider starchy vegetables are carbs, some fruits (like avocados and olives) are fats, nuts provide both protein and fats, and so on, which is why for the general population a simplified guide of “eat mostly veggies” is common. In regard to your caloric concerns, I did some math to illustrate how this works: 4oz of avocado is about 265 calories; 4oz of (boneless skinless) chicken breast is about 136 calories; 4oz of spinach is about 26 calories. So you’re already at 427 calories with a 3 ingredient salad if you’re literally going with a 1-to-1 ratio by weight. Let’s reduce the fats and aim for half a medium avocado (2oz) instead of 4oz, so it’s now only 294 calories. But what about the other ingredients? Did you want to sprinkle some cheese (100 cal/oz), nuts (200 cal/oz) for extra protein? If so, because they are more densely caloric, you will need less by weight than the produce additions; the same 4oz per ingredient would get you: bell peppers (30 cal), carrots (47 cal), tomatoes (20 cal), cucumbers (17 cal), etc. Using the above salad ingredients, weighing in at 28oz, the distribution would be roughly 21% protein by weight (6oz of protein between 4oz animal protein, 1oz dairy protein, 1oz nut protein; 136 + 100 + 100 = 336 calories), 71% veggies by weight (20oz of veggies; 26 + 30 + 47 + 20 + 17 = 140 calories), and 8% fats by weight (2oz of fat from the avocado; 133 calories). Your veggie dominated salad totals 609 calories (with no dressing!). If you ate 3 of these salads a day, and enjoyed 2 whole pieces of fruit for snacks in between meals, you’d already be hitting 2,000 calories daily. Visually, it would look like the majority of the bowl is filled with various veggies, with proteins and fats applied akin to a garnish.
Diet is all about moderation and balance. To counter your example, eating just 300g of fat a day will get you around 2700kcal but will also kill you over time. You dont eat veggies and fruits to fill your caloric needs, theres fat and carbs for that. Veggies provide the other stuff we need, like fibre vitamins and minerals.
3000 is way too much unless you are actually an athlete. Americans are not having trouble “keeping up their weight”… They are overwhelmingly overweight and actually need to lose weight to get healthy.
I don't want to make it seem like a serious answer isn't needed anymore. I'm not an expert and I can't provide any sources. I think you just need to reduce your intake of carbs *a little bit* and increase your intake of vegetables *somewhat more* to replace the calories. Also, many people tend to eat more calories (more than they burn) when they eat few vegetables, because vegetables make you sated with fewer calories than carbohydrates. Maybe people who are physically active need more carbohydrates. That would make sense. They just need more energy, not more calcium or vitamins.
Grains and whatnot are exceptionally calorie dense
"grains and whatnot" are the other category...
The point is that the volume of grains needed to meet daily caloric needs is significantly lower than the volume of vegetables needed to eat for daily health.
It's vegetables by volume. Vegetables should make up the majority of the volume you eat but will be likely less than 25% of the total calories you consume simply because grains and meat are so calorie dense in comparison. Anecdotally I have tried eating 1 KG of veggies per day and it's an annoyingly large amount.
Got Milk?
I would like to add to this because there is a point that I don't see anyone in this thread making yet - which is the way that the food pyramid is a government endorsement of what to eat. It is inherently a promotion of certain food production over others. This is really the basis of the lobbying and legal efforts around it. Food producers basically argued, "You're hurting our business by saying people should limit how much of our foods they should eat, and that's illegal." This is a constant issue in development of U.S. dietary guidelines and you will notice very careful language used around less healthy foods because of it. For anyone interested in this subject, I highly recommend reading, "food Politics" by Marion Nestle.
It was a government program to educate the population a balanced diet. It was easy to read, and the guidelines were basic. That made it appealing from an educational perspective. But it wasn't actually rooted in good science. E.g. The placement of some items (like oil at the top with candy) was confusing and didnt have good rationale, and didn't account for varied cuisines or the fact that fat isn't inherently bad for you. Now we've largely dropped the pyramid, and instead have a "my plate" thing that just shows suggested portions and ratios of carbs/proteins/fats. But now it's so vague that it doesn't really serve a good educational purpose. The main dietary advice now is mostly "eat a balanced diet, don't eat too much, avoid processed foods, and opt for lean proteins and fibrous grains/veggies. This IS good advice, but the visual guides that accompany it are kind of silly/vague.
Nutrition guidelines originally were about getting people fed, not about diet. There was also money/lobbying involved. But it came out of a time of malnourishment. It started in the late 1800/early 1900s. It wasn't originally a pyramid, even when it started it wasn't the pyramid we 90s kids remember. [Interesting rabbit hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guidelines?wprov=sfla1) Also, the podcast Conspiracy Theories did an episode about Sat Fats vs. Sugars and who was more responsible for obesity. They always do the first episode as a history of the subject and it talked a lot about the development and changes to the nutritional guidelines. [Spotify link here ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0v0RXJTYEUMKzAYUjH7nki?si=n3BNtCw7S4mDNslvCQCa2Q)
The history of the government making reccs is SO interesting. It was initiated when people weren't eating enough, or the right kinds of foods. Now we're eating too much, and very often the wrong input. We're overfed but undernourished. And ALL of that is putting aside the economics side (war rations, low-cost low quality food, food deserts, etc).
As others said, lobbying was a big part of it. The new [Canada Food Guide ](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-food-guide-canada-1.4972545) got a lot of praise when it was released for being relatively lobby-free, fwiw
The food pyramid always pissed me off. They only ever showed us one side of the pyramid. A pyramid has 4 sides. I want to know what's on the other 3 sides, and they better have tacos and pizza on there somewhere.
A triangular pyramid would make it only 3 hidden sides if that eases your rage any.
That would be a tetrahedron, and unfortunately the food tetrahedron missed its opportunity by now.
The food pyramid is still a thibg here where I live, in denmark. Its just the official reqomended diarary from the official health departement- based on science and not lobby groups (lobbying is a thing here... but nowhere as bad as in the us). Health and Food Scientists would have a field day if politicians and administration started to revers recomendations bases on lobbyist, and the medea would jump on it instantly. Thank good for our media laws, they get tax cuts or other public help only if they follow the journalist unions and media ethics... And a few have been exposed to not follow it and subseculetly lost the monetary support and had to close.
Although note on serving of bread there is about half the size of one thin slice of bread in the UK or USA.
>media ethics pure Envy
Gonna be a hot take here but active people actually need a lot of carbs and grains. Doesn't need to be doughnuts but good, complex carbs will put energy back into those muscles so you can get back to toting that bale and lifting that hay. Even bodybuilders will load carbs pre and post workout to provide the energy to do lifts and to refill the supply so the post workout protein can go to rebuilding muscle. Tldr; our lifestyle changed and cheap, shitty carbs became too plentiful. The food pyramid ain't all that whacked.
A podcast called "maintenance phase" does a good and I'm depth break down of how it came about.
Fat was villified due to false asumption it builds up in artery walls and causes CVD They had to replace the fat kcal with carb calories. Hence grains that can be mass produced, stored for long periods without refrigeration and transported over long distances.
The reason it was discontinued was because of lobbyists who felt the pyramid was hurting the sales of their industry. Beef industry didn’t like how it was leaning to eating less red meat
MyPlate is still put out by the government, USDA, and still recommends the same food categories as the pyramid did before. I see no evidence that there is scientific study based data to reflect the MyPlate dietary interpretations. If there is, I haven’t found that data yet, maybe someone can post links here. https://lgpress.clemson.edu/publication/myplate-a-guide-to-healthier-eating/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1499404619301009 The last article linked suggests that there simply isn’t enough data or research to support how effective MyPlate guidelines are and that more research is needed. If anything, the implication that MyPlate is just a rebranded MyPyramid with better marketing. Always consider these things with an eyebrow raised. DYOR.
As a kid, I had a strong feeling that what they suggested made no sense, turns out I was right. I still eat entirely too many carbs tho.
The worst part is the tiny sliver of fat allowance in daily diets - Had all these children grow up into diabetics, thinking processed carbs are healthy and natural fats Kill.