Comment by overgard
3 days ago
I'm pleasantly surprised, this is actually really good. The reason I'm surprised is because of how corrupt the creation of the previous food pyramid was (the sugar industry likely paid to downplay the danger of sugar[1])
I find when it comes to health advice, generally government sources can't be trusted because there's too much special interests and money involved. You really have to do your own research.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
This is basically the same as the previous version, the "food plate" that Michelle Obama rolled out in 2011:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03plate.html
It's amusing how outraged people were when Michelle Obama did her Let's Move campaign focused on eating healthy and exercise and now people are pretending it's all new.
(There was also a version before that, in 2005. The "MyPyramid." That one emphasized exercise by having a person walking up a revised version of the pyramid. Though it had a whole giant category for "milk," admittedly as a knock against it. I'll grant today's did a good job in de-emphasizing dairy compared to 2005 and 2011.)
The people who got offended at the 2011 campaign are not the same people who are offended at this 2025 campaign. In the united states, if you do anything, someone, somewhere, will be offended. That's kind of our whole shtick.
To be fair, it's everyone's shtick everywhere.
I haven't thought of a word for it yet, but it has something to do with how many people participate in the discourse now. The numbers are large enough that someone somewhere will always have some opinion. Every time.
> It's amusing how outraged people were when Michelle Obama did her Let's Move campaign focused on eating healthy and exercise and now people are pretending it's all new.
It's the same people who got offended because Obama asked for spicy mustard because they thought that was too fancy, but still actively voted for the guy who actively plates everything with gold so as to maximize how tacky everything looks.
They've never been internally consistent and I'm not entirely convinced that they have any principles outside of "own the libs".
It's a nice website, sure.
But what is this administration actually doing to change American diets? It's going to take a little more than throwing up a marketing landing page with a well produced video and nice photos.
This guidance will be taken in by government agencies that set rules, by schools choosing kids lunches , etc .
Not all government action is in the form of a specific law with specific enforcement mechanism.
You need to read the news, man. The landing page is just a press release. This is a summary of government mandated institutional changes to how food is selected and distributed. This will actually change how millions eat. It is good news.
Have you just called a 50 years old food pyramid as previous? This guideline has been released every 5 years.
The biggest issue with sugar is that it makes stuff taste better which leads to overeating. Incidentally it’s also the only downside of glutamate, it just makes stuff taste so good you’ll eat much more than your appetite would guide you to
My personal anecdotal experience is that once you make a conscious effort to avoid added sugars, your taste buds eventually recalibrate over the course of a few months and you end up perceiving stuff with added sugar as way too sweet.
Same with salt.
It‘s not just the better taste that causes the overeating. Sugar and refined carbs cause blood glucose levels to spike, giving you a surge of energy. That spike is very short-lived, resulting in a sharp drop that then causes cravings for more refined carbs/sugar. This blood glucose rollercoaster can cause all kinds of bad effects like mood swings and brain fog. The problem about refined carbs is that they never truly satiate your hunger. Once you add them to a meal, you get into the loop of chasing the glucose high which is horrible for your body and mind.
The other downsides of both sugar and in particular glutamate are that you'll find other foods less sweet or having less depth of flavor (umami), so you'll be more likely to go for the processed options.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/dyor-do-your-own-...
Unfortunately it's pay-walled so I can't read it, I can only react to the headline. But yes, of course with "do your own research" it's "not that simple", but any student of history should know that you should have a very healthy skepticism of any official or mainstream source. For some reason we think in modernity that we've gotten everything right, and it's only in the past that the official explanations were wrong. My money is on the experts being wrong about a lot of things in this era too.
https://archive.is/NhyjE