Actually, you are exaggerating. The quote is:
(bolding mine).
Remember 15 years ago when fat was the scourage of the nation, and people in their teens were spontaneously exploding because of their fat-clogged arteries? That’s what prompted the change to the four food groups. It can be argued that this change is equally reactive and based on as questionable science, but a correlative link, if not a casual one, does seem to exist
Look, everyone agrees that one gains or loses weight by expending more or less calories than on takes in. Many people also agree that the average person, with apologies to WonderWench will eat, at the very least, when hungry. In other breaking news, the average person will, given their druthers, rest when tired, come in out of the rain when wet, drink when thirsty and have sex when horny.
One of the problems with the food pyramid is that it ignores this. Carbs, especially low-quality carbs such as the type found in the things mentioned in this thread, don’t fill one up, they don’t sate hunger, the don’t provide the sublime satisfaction I find in e.g. dead animal flesh. Hence, even those attempting to maintain a healthy diet based on the best of principals (eat when hungry, stop when not hungry) will gain weight unless that pay particular attention to serving sizes, which while an admirable thing to do, sucks as a life style choice.
Additionally, a diet rich in carbs, particularly low quality carbs, can make many people lethargic and well, tired. Try it some time; live on pasta, even decent pasta, with exceptionally low fat dressings for a week or two. Many, many people will feel lower and lower energy levels, and will gain weight while never really feeling like they’ve had enough to eat.
The obesity epidemic in America is a confluence of a great many factors, and it is a charged enough subject that it is almost impossible to discuss it rationally, without a person either taking it personally, or without someone saying, effectively, “just diet, fatso”. Ultimately, gaining and maintaining a healthy body weight is up to the individual, but it is completely possible that the food pyramid, itself a government-sponsored propaganda attempt that replaces the previous (and much older) government-sponsored propaganda attempt may have, in an honest and legitimate attempt to decrease heart disease, contributed to a new health crisis. It isn’t fair to simply dismiss that based on a misreading of a single line by someone who may or may not be idealogically motivated.
Huh, and all these years I thought I was fat because I wasn’t following the food pyramid. Learn something new every day, I guess.
Or we could take the even more conspiratorial approach, and advance the theory that Dr. Arthur Agatston is an anti-Egyptian Zionist, who’s still befuddled over the return of the Sinai.
Lemme guess, you also think “America – love it or leave it” is a perfectly sensible philosophy to hold, eh?
I had never even considered that. We could, and I would certainly not know how to begin arguing against such a theory.
If anthropology has taught us anything, it’s that humans can get by just fine eating pretty much anything, so long as a rather short list of essential vitamins and nutrients can be had in sufficient amounts. Whether or not such-and-such diet staples will get you to 75 or 80 has been, up until very recently, entirely moot, as you were likely bound to get taken out by something other than diabetes or CAD.
Eat all the fat you want. You just have to hunt it down and kill it yourself. Eat all the carbs you want. Simply grow it and harvest it yourself. See how easy that is?
Until whoever it is that comes up with the magical food formulas learns to stress the unavoidable facts informed by the above, we’re headed for more of the same: A literally growing nation of lard-asses that live just long enough for all chronic physical hell to break loose. And it’s going to be expensive. Very, very expensive.
I think the facts will show we could all eat a steady diet of Twinkies and tomatoes, so long as we could just limit the intake and work out on a regular basis, and we’d still wind up, as a nation, not any worse off. Imagine what the variety afforded by a staple diet of 2000kCal/day of tossed salad and Hamburger Helper, along with a rigorous exercise routine, would do quality of life, if everybody adopted that strategy.
My son came home from kindergarten after learning the food pyramid with “can I have a bowl of ice cream for dinner, its good for you.” I remember learning that - according to the food pyramid - pizza was a great food. And now when I think of deep dish white crust, high fat cheese, sugared sauce and pepperoni - I think “yummy junk food.”
What the food pyramid lacked - or what most people missed in teaching it (and they’ve started to figure out) is that dairy should mean “low fat dairy for adults” not “whole milk cheeses and whipped cream.” That “grains and cereals” means "at least half of your grains as whole grains. That fruit doesn’t mean “fruit snacks” or “peaches packed in heavy syrup” and french fries are no longer a nutritional vegetable. Meats means “lean meats” not bacon as a food group.
As far as carbs go - grains, whole grains, are packed with carbs - but also fiber -and are pretty good for you, in moderation. On the other hand, white sugar is also a carb and has no nutritional value.
America’s (and increasingly, the world’s) fat problem is not due to us not handling food efficiently, it’s due to us handling it too efficiently. I know I’m all set for the next few lean Winters!
I’m not fat because of the food pyramid; I’m fat because I’m a lazy ass and I live on white bread and pretzels. So there.
Dangerosa, The 1992 Food Pyramid did not say any of those things you’re attributing to it. http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/pyrabklt.pdf
Sugar is actually at the very top of the pyramid, and clearly says, “Use sparingly”. Diary is the next highest, equal with meat. If your son learned that ice cream is “good for you”, then he was incorrectly taught what the Food Pyramid is, because that’s definitely not what it says.
It sounds like what they’re trying to do is to fix the Pyramid so that it doesn’t look as though you’re supposed to load up on carbohydrates (although that’s not really what it says). If you look at it, it says vegetables: 3-5 servings, and fruit: 2-4 servings. So fruits & vegetables are 5-9 servings taken together, with carbs being 6-11, which is pretty close to being equally weighted. I guess what they’re gonna change is that they’ll weight fruits & vegetables more than carbs.
Ideally, it would be great to eat mostly fruits & vegetables, but it’s kinda hard to do in the real world. They’re expensive, perish quickly, and don’t fill you up at all, whereas carbohydrates do.
So yeah, vegetables are better for you than carbohydrates, but fat and sugar are NOT better, and should stay at the top of the pyramid. Everyone’s always saying carbs are evil, but you have to consider what you’re eating instead of carbs. Eating a lot of fat as a replacement for carbs is not an improvement - it’s worse.
And let’s please end this “sugar is a carb” Atkins-speak. The USDA is considering them as two entirely different categories, and that makes perfect sense in the context of determining what foods to eat. A slice of whole-wheat bread should not be considered in the same category as a pixie-stick. Period.
What pisses me off (in a bemused sort of way) is that some products (Nabisco?) have Food Pyramid info on the side of the box, telling you to eat 6-11 servings of grains per day. They then state that Cheesy Wheat Twirls are a grain product. Looking at the nutritional info, you see that this box of Cheesy Wheat Twirls contains exactly 6-11 servings. So hey, just eat a box of these every day and you’re all set!
(Apologies to Dangerosa - I didn’t mean to sound like I was harping on you. You were clear about the difference between carbs and sugar. I just meant a general trend I’ve noticed where other people try to equate sugar with carbohydrates when for all practical purposes it doesn’t help anyone to understand nutrition better.)
Which is pretty much it. The problem isn’t with the pyramid…its with how its being taught and/or then processed. Ice cream is a dairy, Cheezy Wheat Twirls are a grain. Pizza is great because it contains all the food groups (and I do remember a home ec teacher telling us that pizza, according to the food pyramid, was the perfect food!). i.e. the Bill Cosby routine about chocolate cake - it has eggs, flour…why its practically an omelet and toast!
(Look at the pyramid…there is ice cream right there in the little picture, which is all a kindergartener is going to pay attention to. That comes home as “ice cream is good for you.”)
Maybe this is crazy, or just a product of my overly-simplified view of nutrition. . .
but, don’t people who regularly exercise NEED, or at least easily BURN UP a lot of carbs. I don’t know anyone who exercises regularly who worries about the amount of carbs in their diet.
Going one step further, doesn’t this mean that people who tout a low-carb diet are effectively touting a diet for people who don’t exercise! Essentially they exclude what I’d consider the majority component of a “life-style” that keeps you fit.
What’s strange to me is that some people seem to separate “diet” and “exercise” in their minds as they pertain to weight loss and/or fitness, as if not exercising and just making some minor change to your diet has all of a sudden makes you healthy.
In my mind, they’re just so completely intertwined, and yet they’re presented from the start as 2 separate issues in your health, and that attitude is carried into adulthood.
I guess I’m even getting a bit sick of “weight” and “weight loss” anyway, as if a number or a size actually had some relationship to an individual’s wellness.
Well, there’s fiber, oligosaccharides, starch polysaccharides, and sugars. All are carbohydrates. Only the last two really increase glycemic load. Glycemic index varies wildly from food to food, and sometimes rather unintuitively. Pound-for-pound, an unbuttered mashed potato is worse for you than straight cane sugar, in terms of blood glucose levels. It’s nuts. You’ve got to be a PhD nutritionist to keep it all the differences in glycemic load straight. If we’ve got to micromanage diet to that extent, something’s wrong.
Not so long ago, most people didn’t worry about what they ate. The worried about if they ate. Three meals of mashed potatos soaked with lard a day meant you stayed alive. Now it’ll kill you. What’s the difference? Portions, and activity.
No. Google on gluconeogenesis for an explanation of why.
As long as we’re on this subject, I’ll take this opportunity to say I’d like to punch the next person who says
“Eat six small meals instead of three larger ones.”
Right. When I can take six small breaks during the day, and when I can have a personal assistant follow me about and make these small meals happen, I’ll consider it.
I agree with the person who said portion control bites big time. Though mostly I can comply reasonably well with that, and excercising a lot helps, it does seem like “enough” is the new “too much”.
Oh, crap, I forgot about that word “fat”. Sigh.
Oh, fucking spare me. Of course it’s just one guy with an agenda, but the point is that he says that the food pyramid makes (some) people fat. That’s obviously ludicrous.
Can you honestly say to me that if most people would eat in proportions of the food pyramid with serving sizes as in the guidelines and a reasonable amount of healthful exercise that the vast majority of people would still be fat because there’s carbs in there? Even if you were a fucking moron and thought “grains” meant Wonderbread and that “dairy” meant ice cream, I bet you still wouldn’t get fat on the appropriate serving size and if you got off your ass and went outside to play.
One thing that might actually be of some use for the USDA to do is to put a lot more work into publicizing exactly what a serving is supposed to look like. Don’t say “a cup” or “__ oz”, say “a piece of meat the size of a deck of cards”. You could scrap the “eat these things” food pyramids and groups entirely and maybe do better good on the “this is how much you should be eating” front. People know what they’re supposed to be eating and not eating. I honestly think many Americans do not really know how much they should be eating.
I’ve found that when I’m sufficiently active with my lifting and cardio, my body naturally craves better foods. I honestly don’t want the candy bars and soda (except for the morning Mountain Dew, I haven’t kicked that habit yet).