Comment by delichon
3 days ago
This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the last one.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...
I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
Edit: The new guidelines are expected to be released today.
https://www.wfla.com/news/national/kennedy-wants-to-end-war-...
> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.
Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.
I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.
The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.
Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.
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Even the myplate doesn't seem right. There's probably too much fruit and too much dairy. There isn't any indication of legumes. Vegetables is too vague. There is no indication of fats, which are part of everything else.
But prior to that it was pushed very hard in elementary schools. I remember performing in a school play that was all about the food pyramid and nutrition, in lockstep with the government propaganda at the time.
I just see one lobby, "Big Macronutrient". We all need to eat. I'll be worried when some company tries to make me eat actual plastic.
We know far less about any of this than we pretend to.
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I consider the traditional food pyramid, with grain at the base, to make a lot of economic sense.
The question is not "what's best for you", but "how to keep as many people as possible well fed and reasonably healthy". And an important part of it is that everyone gets enough calories, even the poor, and even during hard times.
Grain is an efficient source of calories, and grain products tend to have a good shelf life and don't need refrigeration. And ideal baseline for keeping people from starving.
But grain is good for calories, but not enough to keep people healthy, you also need vitamins, fiber, etc... So you introduce the second food group: fruits and vegetables. A bit more expensive and more involved than grain, but it provides most of the things grain don't.
Now, we are at a vegan diet, and experience has shown that it can be perfectly healthy, but in order for it to be, you need to do a significant amount of bookkeeping, and you may need some slightly exotic food to avoid deficiencies. So, not enough for the general population, so you introduce animal products. Even more expensive, but now you have everything you need, with good margins.
The top of the pyramid is for the products for which the needs are covered more efficiently by the lower layers.
> a significant amount of bookkeeping [...] for the general population
True, but not really more or less than a diet including animal products: in both cases they'll be good by varying the sources of macronutrients. In fact most long-term, healthy vegans don't bother bookkeeping what they eat. Some athletes and weight-loss seeker does but it's not particular to plant-based diet.
Vegan bookeeping is a common fallacy. A while ago I had an odd conversation with a doctor that went like that:
- It's complicated, you'll need to count everything ! - Is it different with animal products ? - Oh yes no count I advise 1-2 serve of red meat every 2 weeks, 2-4 serve of fish per week, 1 serve of seafood once in a while 2 serves of chicken per week, adjusted if you workout. Also 2 diary product per day but avoid salty cheeses too often or in large quantity. - I count 1 pill of b12 per day.
"Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies"
Maybe adults, but probably not the people who were taught the food pyramid - children.
Edit: changed the tense to acknowledge this was in the past. Thought that was obvious since the food pyramid was a thing of the past.
Nit: Children haven't been taught the food pyramid in something like a couple of decades I think. Current model is something like the DailyPlate visual - a plate filled proportionally with various things.
Definitely agree with the concern here, but this is not a problem unique to the food pyramid. Children will be taught all kinds of propaganda if they attend a public school. It's part of the cost, just not the part that is taken from tax dollars.
Who is being taught the food pyramid? Its been 20 years since it was discontinued. I don't know any children being taught it.
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Anecdotally, only the "health focused" people around me understand that the food pyramid was for a different time and based on other interests.
And I don't think adults on a grand scale question it, or process nutrition labels.
Boomers in particular (who engrained Gen x and millennial diets) are most likely to follow grains (and margarine) diets.
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
Food pyramid was taught when I was in school, but that was before 2011 (as mentioned by another commenter) my own children are in school now and their school lunches align with more modern ideas (veggies and proteins). Certainly could still be improved but I recognize the cost, scale, delivery constraints, plus allergy considerations makes this non-trivial.
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When people say that SNAP (food stamps) should "only be able to buy healthy foods", they have to be reminded what the government considers to be healthy and just importantly, what the government considers to be unhealthy. Since SNAP is a government program, it almost certainly would use government guidelines on what is healthy.
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Source?
I think the real problem is that a food pyramid is an oversimplification.
No matter what you do, “fruits” isn’t really a goal — it’s macronutrients and micronutrients like vitamins, fiber, etc.
So with or without lobbying, any food pyramid will always be wrong. A food pyramid exists because it is far more relatable than comparing nutrient labels and tabulating.
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
If you do the opposite of whatever Kennedy recommends, you probably wouldn’t be too far off doing the right thing.
Eating nothing but processed foods, sugar, and heavily processed grains? That sounds like the opposite of what Kennedy recommends, which is a recipe for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He’s got his problems, many of them, but eating real food without a bunch of processing seems like a fairly common sense thing.
Red meat (a known carcinogen) at the top is gold. All that saturated fat the energy will come from (not from protein or veggies) will probably cause heart problems and plaque formation in arteries, not to mention insulin resistance just from increased FFAs in blood.
Vegetarians and vegans have lower T2D incidence on average FWIW.
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Is this with or without the increase in saturated fat he recommends? Or more red meat?
Health policy decisions would ideally be based on some sort of evidence, not the quackery he spouts.
Yes, some of his changes are an improvement. Most aren’t.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5675784-kennedy-satura... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-jr-upsets-foo...
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It's a "meme" that sugar is worse for you than fat?
Yes and also a true meme.
What annoys me the most is that sat fat is a huge way that sugary products are made more palatable to people. People love butter. It is every chef's 2nd favorite tool, just after salt.
Butter is only a favorite because Lard has been some demonized that no chef would ever use it anymore.
That, and the only readily available form of lard stinks of rancid hog.
Approximately nobody has access to high quality leaf lard like the food blogs champion.
Chefs use animal fats all the time. They think about cooking temperature, flavor, etc to make decisions.
Ever spread lard on toast? Do you prefer croissants made with lard? Is everyone's favourite dish these days lard chicken (I mean the Indian dish, not the Soul Food dish, which is of course popular in some locales).
Nope. Butter is favoured because it tastes unctuous. Nothing to do with Big Cow or any special interest lobby local to certain valleys in the USA. Except maybe Big Bacon Drippings, because if there's one thing better for a grill cheese than butter it's bacon grease (thick-sliced sourdough bread, sharp Cheddar cheese, a shmear of chili crisp)
Now, suet has been demonized to the point that nobody makes suet pudding any more. A shame, really.
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Excuse me? The trendiest of restaurants around me advertise that they have beef fat fried fries/potatoes.