Comment by rayiner
2 days ago
Didn’t those professionals give us the original food pyramid that told us to stuff our faces with bread? Weren’t they the same people that told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol? And tell us to limit our fish consumption?
Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.
And tell us to limit our fish consumption?
The only recommendations to limit fish that I have seen are due to mercury exposure risks:
https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/advice-about-eating-fish
Coal burning and incidental industrial releases drastically increased the amount of mercury in surface waters over the past century. The released mercury gets transformed by bacteria into organomercury compounds which are lipophilic and concentrate up the food chain, meaning that predator fish like tuna and swordfish can contain orders of magnitude more mercury than the water they live in.
There are plenty of fish with much lower mercury levels (like salmon, trout, and sardines):
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/mer...
You can eat all the salmon you want without worrying about mercury, and I haven't seen government advice to the contrary.
Your first link recommends limiting fish for children to 2 servings per week, even from the “best choices” list. By contrast it recommends kids 1-5 have two servings a day of other meat and poultry: https://www.parkchildcare.ie/food-pyramid-for-1-5-year-old-c...
Thats tantamount to a recommendation that fish should comprise a minority of your protein, which is backwards. It’s almost certainly healthier overall for fish to be your primary protein source and to eat red meat, chicken, and pork sparingly. How many servings a week of fish do you think Japanese kids eat?
This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"
also misleading. Nutrition science did not give the "food pyramid" quoted above, historically, it was Dept of Agriculture and associated lobbyists.
The Department of Agriculture employs 2,000 scientists: https://www.ars.usda.gov/docs/aboutus/
Who was lobbied? The lobbyists can’t publish things in the Federal Register. How it works is they try to influence the experts at the agencies to support their position. That’s what lobbying is. It’s all laundered through experts both in the private sector and the government.
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This is an incorrect response in that this isn't about reasoning, this is about feels.
The food pyramid was the result of intense lobbying and political processes, not scientists and doctors.
No, that was the US Dept of Agriculture. You need to talk to an actual RD.
It was pushed by food lobbies, like a lot of topics in current admin