Comment by zeroonetwothree
2 days ago
For all the lunacy of RFK this somehow is actually a really good set of guidelines? Certainly better than the previous version. I didn't expect that to be honest.
2 days ago
For all the lunacy of RFK this somehow is actually a really good set of guidelines? Certainly better than the previous version. I didn't expect that to be honest.
I had a similar reaction. Although I can't help but notice that even in something like this it included the now obligatory combative culture war framing with "we are ending the war on protein".
It’s even more ridiculous because Protien has been like the no 1 promoted macronutrient for the last decade of nutrition advice.
Pretty sure nobody reputable has ever said “eat less protein”
It must be such a tiring way to live, constantly enflamed in imaginary thought wars.
That's not how it works, they're just inflating the importance of their work by elevating it to a battlefield, and they're the heroes.
You see it across all kinds of industries. Presumably each individual is just engaged in the solitary imaginary thought war. Surely they're not soldiers on multiple fronts. Superheroes?
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Au contrair, wars invigorate reactionaries, they don’t know any other way to live.
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Those DEMOCRAT SOYBOYS are gonna hate this, but I'm gonna say it anyways. Today we're joining the WAR on protein- ON THE SIDE OF THE PROTEIN.
It's an idiocracy bit, the continual flanderization of the USA. It reminds me of carlin's act about how everything we do has to be contextualized into war: we can't just solve homelessness, we have to declare WAR on homelessness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncLOEqc9Rw).
Going to be pretty crazy when they find out soy is actually a good source of protein.
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It was a low bar. The previous nutrition guidelines were garbage for generations
Which ones? The guidelines this replaced were "half your plate should be fruits and vegetables, the other half protein and grains (at least half of which should be whole grains)." That's not way different from this.
There are differences: the previous guidelines are very down on saturated fat, for example. But I feel like a lot of people are imagining that this is replacing the old food pyramid with the huge grain section at the bottom bigger than everything else, when that's been gone for over a decade.
Realistically I don't think these guidelines really have much effect at all, except maybe things like school lunch programs that may be downstream of them.
> which ones?
The literal food pyramid that’s printed god knows where and that is recommended in many countries due to US recommendations.
Have you been to the site OP linked?
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And what does it say about traditional governance that it takes a someone like RFK to actually do anything about it.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. A running clock set incorrectly is correct zero times a day. If you have an incorrect clock, the solution isn't to stop the clock, it's to set it correctly and fix the process
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That a majority of your populace not caring about how they're governed is bad for a democratic republic.
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I think it says that industries have a lot of power over governments in the US, especially when they are critical to people's survival. The food industry has enormous power, maybe more than any other industry in the US. Few other industries mint their own laws that fly in the face of the constitution as well as the food industry. Ag Gag laws are crazy. People talk about people being labelled terrorists for activities that are obviously not terrorism. Animal Rights activists who go to extremes have been familiar with that for a while now.
What does it say about the current administration that appointed a science-denying halfwit to run HHS and knowingly kill children with his anti-vaxx bullsh*t?
And 52 GOP coward senators that approved the idiot. The only stand out was Mitch McConnell because he was almost paralyzed by polio as a child and knows first hand the damage RFK is doing.
I'm amazed the new guidelines don't recommend a daily portion of roadkill, preferably raw.
from what i can tell, most of this is existing stuff that advocates have been trying to push for a while now.
i think it's a perfect example of why advocates for any policy should have specific, achievable, and well-documented goals - you never know who might be an ally. politicians don't want to do this sort of detailed work, they're looking for preexisting policy they can champion, and if you're standing there ready to hand it to them when they're looking for it you get get good stuff done.
Yeah, I was about to say this.
Even before RFK Jr rubbed his metaphorical nutsack all over our healthcare system, doctors pretty much always told me to eat better. They told me to avoid processed foods, avoid sugar, and focus on fiber and protein.
I don't know why RFK Jr. is getting credit for telling people to eat healthy, especially since some of his recommendations (e.g. telling people to eat french fries if they're fried in beef tallow) are actively bad and will likely lead to people becoming more overweight and less healthy.
Because nobody else changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage until him. Who else would you congratulate for this specific action? Your own personal doctor??
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Reminds me of something said about Pete Hegseth:
Sure he may be a meathead moron who can only advocate that the military should get jacked, but if the military really DOES need to get in better shape and his brainiac predecessors weren’t actually doing anything about that, he’s actually functionally smarter than them.
So to answer your question, if RFK is doing the thing that needs to be done, he should get the credit.
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I’m pinning the blame for the frustrating animate-while-you-scroll design squarely on RFK.
Apple has been using this UX for years. Blaming it on RFK is ridiculous.
It actually behaves surprisingly well when you just scroll with the spacebar, as I always do[1].
[1] note: using this method (spacebar to jump one screenful, and shift-spacebar to go back up) on sites that insist on doing the "sTiCkY hEaDeR" idiocy results in losing a line or two on every page, so, I guess, don't get too used to it as it's hard to use today.
I can’t find the space bar on my iPhone and I’m afraid to ask now.
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it's a terrible design and i can't believe they've done this to the american people
There's absolutely no need for the average American to eat more protein, we are eating more protein than ever and health outcomes are not improving. Likewise, the dairy intake recommendation is not backed by any science whatsoever.
When I went as a kid with my parents to the US, there was this 'milk, it does a body good' commercial playing all the time. While in my country there was already talk that it really doesn't do a body good. Not sure what it ended up with, but we definitely never had the kind of gallons of milk in the fridge and grabbing cartons when you want something to drink.
Better than which one? I don't think it's really an improvement over either the exercise slice pyramid nor the "choose my plate" recommendation. It is better than the popular one from the 90s though, sure.
https://www.familyconsumersciences.com/2011/06/usda-food-pyr...
There remains concerns about saturated fat, especially for those with high cholesterol levels. I recognize that mistakes have been made in the past (low fat diets, fear of salt, etc), but it seems like RFK et al are driven by ideology rather than science.
RFK is a pretty fit, healthy guy. Whatever he believes is certainly working.
He spent 15 years as a heroin junkie. I sure hope that doesn't show up in the US RDA.
He has bad skin, which is surely a sign something about his lifestyle is not so healthy.
A friend of mine is in great shape and smokes cigarettes
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Poe's law in action.
This is the guy famous for having and being proud of his brain worm.
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He's injecting testosterone. End of discussion.
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The problem in my eyes is that it's performative. They're making this announcement as if they're doing something revolutionary (they're switching the food pyramid diagram around) while at the same time doing so much to damage the health of Americans: dramatically cutting healthcare access, bringing vaccine denialism to the mainstream, holding press conferences in which they wildly assert that nobody should ever take Tylenol, elevating discourse around quackerism like Methylene blue. The list goes on. And they're making this announcement after spending the entirity of the Obama administration vilifying Flotus for trying to raise awareness of healthy eating.
Its the same thing with eliminating red40 dye. its a crumb. At the very least they should end corn syrup subsidies. Its telling how people often bring up people buying candy with food stamps, but never trace the source of the problem back to how we subsidize bad food. America has a huge blindspot for corporate welfare
The problem is framing this as "most americans are sick" and blaming it on diet.
Finally someone addresses the king's attire!
State a problem. Propose a "solution" without doing anything to establish that it is actually a solution. Make it about "real", ignore the real issue of what one gets from the calories consumed. It's not the processing that makes food bad, it's that ultraprocessed foods are optimized for enjoyable eating, messing up our body's regulatory system. We eat too many calories too fast and get little from them other than calories.
Especially objectionable to me is whole milk. It's so easy to drink so many calories.
40% of the population is obese. The framing seems on point to me. The actual advice is less so. Even more red meat is not the solution.
You don't think that's in part because of economics, education, healthcare, or other factors? The framing of this site is that it is purely a "you're eating wrong" problem.
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Sure. Give him a participation trophy. Assuming the guidelines aren't just to promote favored industries like meat production.
Yeah I'm failing to see the problem here. They are very common sense guidelines for a population that is missing the mark big time.
Will this cause you to update your priors about RFK?
This has been the running theme so far: Big talk to energize the base and make a splash, followed by actual policy implementations that are much more down to earth.
Remember all the talk about banning COVID vaccines? In the end they just changed the wording of the federal recommendations and included things like "having a sedentary lifestyle" as one of the vague reasons to get a COVID vaccine. In some states you had to get a doctor to write a prescription, annoyingly, but the overall picture is that it's still much easier to get a COVID vaccine in the US than under something like the NHS.
Too late to edit, but I see I'm getting downvoted.
To clarify, I'm not in support of the actions or the administration. I'm just pointing out that this is becoming a trend where they say one thing but do something milder.
Regarding the NHS: Here's a link showing NHS COVID-19 vaccine eligibility, which is highly restricted relative to the access we enjoy in the United States: https://staustellhealthcare.nhs.uk/surgery-information/news/...
Again, I'm not saying the current system is good or that the NHS has it right, but trying to put it in perspective.
I'm surprised that governments didn't take this problem more seriously. Obesity is a huge problem, people have been ignoring it only because improvements in medicine have been offsetting the general health decline. Without the medical improvements that save the life of obese people, life expectancy would have decreased. I don't expect the Trump administration to make the best decisions but at least they are taking it somewhat more seriosly.
I don't believe the creators of this propaganda take this problem seriously at all. Their actions speak far louder than their words, even words on a page that scrolls weird like it's 2015.
Republicans were actively angry at past attempts to fight obesity or limit sugar.
There is another side to the nutrition recommendations beyond pure nutrition and that's economics. Pro business Republicans were loathe to anger big food producers.
On the flip side, this new food guide is now advocating a diet that is far more expensive for average consumers at a time when food inflation is already hurting so many households.
Most of it seems fine, although eating even more meat than we already do is a bit perplexing.
The new "guidelines" for alcohol are pretty laughable though. I say that as someone who enjoys his fair share of beers. “The implication is don’t have it for breakfast," <- direct quote from celebrity Dr Oz during the press conference.
There is some good health advice mixed in with the rest of the MAHA lunacy, particularly around diet and exercise.
Unfortunately their stances on vaccines, supplements, and mental health make are still awful
The problem is the massive emphasis on eating as a part of health. As if eating right is the only thing you need to do to avoid all disease. That putting other substances (e.g. vaccines) in your body will make you unhealthy.
I do not think there is room for anti-vaxxers on this site.
Evidence please.
Evidence of what exactly? That RFK Jr. focuses on healthy eating while vilifying vaccines and other established health practices?
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Well, it's... what we've been told to do (at least in the rest of the world) for more than a century? Packaged as some "app-like" / "tech-like" website?
Pathetic
I don't think there was guidance to avoid ultra processed foods 100 years ago anywhere in the world. I don't believe that concept even existed, let alone was promulgated by health authorities. But I'd lkvd to be proven wrong.
Well it wasn't there because there was no processed food.. but still the guidance everywhere on earth (except USA) is to eat fresh, non-processed food
If the old wisdom is correct then there is no issue in regurgitating it in a format suitable for a modern audience. We departed from it for a very long time, especially in regards to fat and processed foods. America has been been on a sharp decline in diet-related health.
The deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have.
> deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have
A fast-food meal is an expensive meal by global standards. The problem is partly cost. And party education and time. But it’s almost certainly not income.
> The deeper problem is that you can feed a family with a few bucks at a fast food joint. Eating correctly costs money, money that Americans don't have.
No you can't, in reality. It only seems so because the fast-food industry is heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
Organic food would be much more affordable otherwise
The man is stark raving bonkers mad in that head-in-the-sand, if-I-ignore-science-then-it-can't-hurt-me way but (and OMG I think I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth) isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?
Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.
"Isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?"
If by this you mean to ask if the new guidelines are the same as previous ones from the 80s, then no. The new pyramid is different, makes different recommendations (more meat, for instance, and less wheat and grains). The website linked to explicitly shows how it is different from the previous "food pyramid" guidelines.
No, what I meant was "haven't we been basically ignoring science on nutrition since the 80s?" I think we have.
For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.
Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.
You went on a bit of a rant there - lol. I like the new guidelines they explicitly disavow processed food. As for vaccines, not everyone complaining about specific vaccines is anti vax. A lot of vaccines are also region specific. Eg HK does TB vax for kids because Nannie’s from Indonesia carry TB. No one does the TB vax in the US.
A lot of vaccines are tailored towards the mother going back to work. They could be tailored for a later schedule if there is concern about secondary effects like autism and the child is being cared for at home.
Again I’m not anti vax but I also don’t think the protocol designers are providing alternative options which they should.
> if there is concern about secondary effects like autism
It would sound more scientific and less anti-vaxxer if you said “concern about secondary effects like astrological contamination”
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How dare you insult my diet of 7 Sausage McGriddles per day!
> I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth
The American cult of personality is ridiculous. The only winning move is not to play.
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> How long did humanity survive without vaccines for _everything_? Oh that's right.
Is this a trick question? Humanity survived by having enough people with enough other useful traits (like thinking, including the ability to reason about disease and how to prevent it) to overcome the numbers lost to disease. Humans died to disease in enormous numbers.
> nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.
Herd immunity presents a real challenge to idea that people should generally be allowed to make their own choices. One's choice here affects everyone else, in a minuscule way that nonetheless adds up to many thousands of lives saved. I'm not sure what the answer is for this, but generally I come down on the side of: if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
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How long did INDIVIDUAL humans survive without vaccines and modern medicine? It was very uneven - crazy high infant mortality, suffering for many through multiple preventable diseases, etc.
My mom had measles as a kid in the 40s and as a result, had frequent ear infections for a few years afterwards. That's a bunch of real pain and suffering that could have been prevented. It wouldn't have affected the "will humans survive" question at all - she's still alive in her 80s. But her life could have had less misery and pain. I have a friend who has a twisted leg and a limp because polio vaccines were not available in Czechoslovakia when he was a kid in the 70s.
In the end, the general outcome of vaccines is to raise the quality of life of ALMOST the entire group significantly. And yes, the odd one has a bad reaction - but even then, it's most likely LESS than if they actually got the real disease.
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Humanity survived - but a lot of individual died that wouldn't today. As a parent I don't want to see most of my children die before they reach 5. I've been to more funerals of children in my life than I want to. The vast majority of the children I've ever met will see their 65th birthday: because of vaccines and modern drugs.
My wife would also hate having to give birth a dozen times just to get enough children (that much unprotected sex is fine with me). I don't want my wife to die in childbirth which was fairly common before modern drugs as well.
There IS scrutiny on vaccines, by the scientific and medical community - your "scrutiny" (as presumably neither a PhD in a relevant field or MD) is not valuable or relevant. There is decades of research that says that currently recommended vaccines are safe and effective.
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Are you also living in a cave and hunting your food, since humanity survived on that for millennia?
How many years faster would we have gotten through the black death if some people had been vaccinated against it? Was losing over 30% of Europe's population better than... not doing that?
>How long did humanity survive without vaccines for _everything_? Oh that's right.
for most of human history, half of kids died before reaching adulthood.
Vaccines and antibiotics are central to child life expectancy increase. But yes - if patients are concerned about certain vaccines they should be allowed to take them on a delayed schedule
How many millions died or were crippled by diseases which are now preventable?
Smallpox, polio, measles, etc
Sure, 50% to 70% of people who got smallpox survived, which also means that without vaccines you are condemning 30% to 50% of the population to die.
Same with the millions of people, specially in poorer countries, who died or were paralyzed by polio.
Vaccines have make those horrors a thing of the past, yet people today are concerned about "hat doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to take _all_ of them without scrutiny, nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual."
Time has diminished the horrors of something that was fairly common a 100 years ago.
They have been scrutinized by many tests by multiple governments over decades. The do your own research crowd needs to take their own medicine on vaccines.
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What lunacy?
Listening to him talk about the Spanish Flu, and clearly not understand why secondary bacterial infections killed more people than the flu itself, was my personal point of "wow, this guy is an idiot".
In his book "The Real Anthony Fauci" he spends a whole chapter claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS and it was actually caused by recreational drug use.
AI generated health report citing hallucinated research and incorrectly representing real research.
He believes germ theory is a creation of Big Pharma to push "patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology"
He believes in the miasma theory and just maintaining a healthy immune is enough to keep you from getting sick.
Just read his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" and you'll realize that this man shouldn't be trusted to run a kindergarten nurses office.
Antivax, avocated against pasteurization, thinks fries are healthy when fried in beef tallow, swam in sewers with his grandkids to prove the human body is naturally immune to diseases and vaccines are unnecessary, tried to ban paracetamol based on bad research linking it to autism, and much more if you care to dig a little.
He's never been anti-vax, though he has advocated for better data about vaccines with good reason--it's abominable. He's advocated against requiring milk to be pasteurized. One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish. The other ones sound weird so I will indeed dig a little.
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Acetaminophen, honestly, shouldn't be recommended so frequently, especially for kids, and if he's against it, I view that as a big point in his favor. The distance between the therapeutic and liver toxic doses is too small for kids, less than 2.5x the max recommended dose, and it's based on kid's weight, so very young kids can't really be given the amount shown on the box. For example, a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose. That's a pointy-ass UX failure.
Growing up, my mom, a pediatrician, never let tylenol in the house because she saw too many kids come through the pediatric ER with liver failure because of it in her hospital shifts. It's the leading cause of acute liver toxicity in the US.
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We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise. Other global medical experts seem to be going against many of his plans.
Kennedy has never said anything like that
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> We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise
To clarify, this is an example of RFK's lunacy, not the user's opinion to be voted on.
The end result of his vax push has been to reduce the set of government required vaccines down to the same set used by Europe already. Additional vaccination is still available should an individual elect.
Are you of the opinion that the European recommendation is insufficient? Would you petition European healthcare industry that they are requiring too few vaccines? If so, I would expect Europeans to be chronically far more diseased than Americans, do we see that in the data?
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It's true - none of his conspiracy theories involve the moon directly.
Anti-vaccine, anti-tylenol, stating that circumcision causes autism, stating wireless 5G damages DNA, stating that vaccines are part of a anti-black conspiracy, hiv/aids denialism, believing that contrails are actually chemtrails, etc etc etc.
Link to chemtrails comments: https://gizmodo.com/rfk-jr-goes-full-tinfoil-pledges-to-stop...
Link to autism comments: https://www.cato.org/blog/circumcision-tylenol-autism-rfk-jr...
Misc including 5g comments: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...
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Can you link to your strongest source for one of those claims?
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Staunch anti-vaccine, and he's tearing apart the CDC wit regards to the same.
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But he didn't say that. He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful. Whenever we discover a link between two things, it's important to share that in a responsible way. It takes years or a decade of research to prove causation, but we should issue warnings once a link is established. A lot of people can be harmed if the government does not publish when it finds harm that correlates with a substance.
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I wonder how affordable or accessible is it in US to follow this effectively.
I know it’s important to have an informative guideline, but isn’t it strangely reminiscent of “just say no”?
A stopped clock is right twice a day. These recommendations come from a corrupted source and therefore have no value.
...but you just made the argument that corrupted sources can be, on occasion, correct.
There's no contradiction there. A stopped clock is sometimes right and has no information value.
If a particular clock was never right, that would actually give it positive information value, because it would at least tell you one time it isn't.
One of the big design flaws of the engima machine was that no plaintext letter ever encrypted to the same letter.
This... is so silly.