No, that’s not what he said, either. He said that the food pyramid contributes to the obesity epidemic. As in, for instance, the average over-weight American is 50 pounds over ideal and if they ate a little more red meat and a little less whole grain pasta many of them might find that they weren’t fucking hungry and skipped that 200 calorie snack at midnight. Skipping that every night won’t get them to ideal body weight, but they might find they stop gaining pounds and don’t feel sluggish, cranky and hungry all the time. They might find that they are, after a few months, 30 or 40 pounds overweight. That’s one possible meaning of “contributing to”. He did not suggest that the food pyramid, in isolation, is the 100% cause of all the weight gain in any single person.
Nope, would not be inclined to say that. In fact, I didn’t say that. What I would, and did say, was that if one follows the food pryamid, many are inclined to still feel hungry and tired. Hungry people keep eating. People who keep eating get fat. Some foods make one feel full faster. Some foods are digested differently. To the extent that the designers of the food pyramid fail to recognize that a fairly normal person attempting to follow it will feel cranky, tired and hungry in exchange for maintaining a healthy body weight is the extent to which they fail at helping people make healthy choices.
The de-emphasis on meats is an attempt to cut down on heart disease. Moderate intakes of fat and red meat (my apologies to vegetarians, who in my experience are infinitely more knowledgable about this than I am), in many people, allows to them a concommitment reduction in caloric consumption in pastas, grains, and other starches. That is, many people will find that an extra, say, four hundred calories in relatively low fat meat will allow them to cut, say, 600 calories in grain products (all numbers made up, I am not a doctor, consult a doctor before starting any diet, and if you take dieting advice from some guy on the internet you deserve to die). Some diets have found that some people can replace a diet of a zillion calories of grains with half a zillon calories of meat and actually stick to the diet because they don’t feel hungry and tired all the time.
Look, I have…experimented with various forms of hunger in my time. I know what it feels like to subsist on pasta and bread. I know what it feels like to exist solely on plums (long story). I know what it feels like to subsist entirely on hamburgers. I can assure you that, in order of desirability, its pretty much plums, burgers, and pasta, and that in order to feel like I wasn’t going to kill and eat the next person I encountered, I needed a lot more calories from the grains than I did from the burgers. One one-thousand (1500? I forget) calorie Fat burger made me a lot less inclined to need food than 3,000 calories of whole grain pasta did.
A healthy diet should not mean being tired and hungry all the fucking time. The food pyramid and the associated serving sizes mean that many, many people will feel hungry and tired all the time, even though they are technically healthy. If the government has constructed a diet scheme that says “eat this way and you’ll feel hungry and tired all the time”, they’ve constructed one that many, many people are going to fail. That’s going to lead, inexorably, to a bunch of overweight people. Saying “well, you should just tough it out and be hungry you fat whiner” does nothing whatsoever to address the problem and flies in the face of everything about people, especially the bit where they have more important things to do than sit around counting calories.
No one, other than you, has suggested that anyone at all is overweight solely because of the food pyramid. Good choices, judicious uses of fat, high intakes of fruits (which, frankly, I think get short shrift in the current food pyramid) and an emphasis on the better types of grains, combined with an active life style and drastically limited intake of convenience foods are important, too. But the food pyramid needs to be considered and revamped so it takes into account the actual actions of actual people, the actual feelings brought on by eating foods. There is nothing at all to suggest that this one, constructed specifically to reduce fats, did that.