I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.
I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.
Buying decisions from parents was influenced. Advertising influenced people. School lunches. What parents would feed other kids after activities. Habits of people "never giving it a second thought" were still being shaped by these forces. Even if someone only thinks about it a fraction of the time, it moves the needle. If my mom ate 10% more processed carbs than her parents and passed those habits to me, I was impacted. Rinse Repeat for 60 years.
Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.
The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.
Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).
It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).
I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.
Actually, to a shocking degree, yes.
I grew up in an immigrant family, so my parents were far too busy working to do non-mainstream research on diet. I grew up eating 2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time.
If your parents aren't well-off enough to do dedicated research into the optimal diet for their children (which describes most of American parents), then you'll follow the advertised government guidelines.
Cereal… not so great.
The main problem is the processing, not the underlying grain ;)
I mean, except for the white rice (which should always be whole, like all grains in your diet) this seems like a good diet. Of course it all depends on how much stuff you were given to eat, but there is nothing wrong with this
It matters a lot, especially if it's a main part of your diet.
And getting the majority of your calories from grains of any type is in no way a "good diet". That myth needs to die.
Every dietitian tells you to vary your diet as much as possible. Your reply is moot because you are blindly considering 1 argument at a time while the guidelines paint a whole picture
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
> he or she also consumes 36 pounds of cooking oils – more than three times as much as in the early 1970s.
If it's not like that, probably other factors were a lot more important than the food pyramid.
And even if a huge number of Americans did robotically follow it that would not explain the obesity epidemic, because the obesity epidemic is worldwide.
But many countries that had a similar food pyramid are relatively thin, and some countries that are very obese never had one, so you're right that it's a poor explanation
Most breakfast cereals have tons of sugars added. The top part of the food pyramid—the smallest area—is for foods with added sugars. The food pyramid never justified eating a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, though that seems to basically be what people accuse it of.
The top layer was "Fats, Oils, & Sweets" and had some white and yellow spots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)
Telling people they should be having a lot of cereal and showing them a bowl of cereal (along with saltine crackers) is going to lead them to believe that's healthy. Especially in the 90's when "cereal" for almost everyone meant highly processed breakfast cereals with a lot of added sugars, and there was little awareness with how much sugar was being added to everything.
Telling people to eat a lot of whole grains is entirely different from telling people to eat a lot of, quote: "bread, cereal, rice and pasta."
I think it's because
1. Diet fads can be extremely lucrative
2. Stuff you put into your body touches on topics of purity and cleanliness, which have always been a big deal to us. Many religions have strong opinions on it, but it probably predates them.
3. Large interest groups do in fact organize to push their products as healthy, or at least less unhealthy. So there is some "conspiracy", both for and against carbs (and protein, and whatever).
Maybe instead of trying to spread your meme of "government always bad", you try to take on the European meme of "government needs to be good or everything goes to hell"?
In terms of Europe, the level of corruption and competence seems to be highly variable depending on the country. So again it seems misplaced to make a broad assertion like the one you made.
Before anyone tries anything funny I'm neither American, nor Western European, nor Protestant.
It's entirely possible that the US would've also succeeded had it opened its doors to millions of East Asian immigrants, but that didn't happen.
You need the initial immigrants to do the heavy lifting, plus they majorly control politics.
Mass Chinese migration to the US only really began after the Civil War, and was quickly locked down with the Chinese Exclusion Act [0] only a few decades after the doors were "opened". Even then, naturalization of Chinese citizens as US citizens was still restricted. There even had to be a Supreme Court case to establish that the children of Chinese immigrants born in the US were US citizens! [1]
The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1943, when a small number (literally hundreds, almost nothing) of Chinese migrants were allowed in, with that increasing slowly over time.
Even today, Chinese and Indian (and others, but the impact is greatest for high population countries) migration is limited by the H1B cap and multi-decade green card queues. If the queue to get a green card is so long that you'll die first [2], you have effectively been banned from permanent residency and naturalization.
My point is simple: doors were open to European migrants, so European migrants built the US and formed its national character. Other methods and types of migration may have also worked to build the US, but we'll never know because the US restricted them heavily and still does.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark
[2]: https://www.wionews.com/india-news/more-than-400000-indians-...
And FDR interned 110,000 Japanese Americans in WW2. My dad who lived in Long Beach at the time said much of this was motivated by envy, as the Japanese Americans ran prosperous farms and businesses.
Any other settlers of the same kind would have succeeded. As a counterexample Spanish and Portuguese settlers largely failed to establish similar societies.
Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.
The playbook for a succesful free market economy is to use protectionism at home and (if applicable: if the state can be called imperialistic) impose free market principles on subject nations so that domestic corporations can exploit them.
Look at South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.
> People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy.
Look at the Gini coefficient of the US.
> The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.
Not Russia.
> Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.
Chile had a coup in 1973 which removed the social democratic leader from power and installed a neoliberal government. Neoliberalism is the modern free market incarnation. Why didn't they thrive?
Nope. Protectionism hurts the economy because it is an impediment to free trade.
> South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.
Protectionism hurts the economy, but not enough to sink it. Free markets are remarkably resilient to damage.
> Not Russia.
Russia's economy is a kleptocracy.
> Chile
Installing a neoliberal government doesn't mean they actually instituted a free market. Chile has, as I said, gone back and forth between free markets and socialism. The country would get on its feet with the free markets, then switch back to socialism until it was on its knees again.
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2020/fall-chile#expla...
The more free market an economy, the better it does. The more communist it is, the worse it does.
I have no love for nominally Communist States - they're authoritarian centralised party states a gnats arse or less from full dictatorships perpetrating the lie that they're on the path toward some socialist | communist goal - but they are all far away removed from such things.
That's a long-winded way to say Settler Colonialism.
In any case you can cherry-pick any variable you want when talking about such disparate nations.
> "ambitious, motivated, solid work ethic, respect for education and legitimate entreprise".
Spanish and Portuguese settlers, for reasons that are beyond me, didn't manage to create societies where these values are at their core.
We have done that in the federal political sphere for quite a while. The last vestiges of actually doing political right for the moral principle was probably back in the 80s or 90s.
There is a lot of corruption in the backwaters, and again at the high levels of large city government, but in general in the civil service there isn't corruption.
Likewise the military is still relatively uncorrupt in its administration, outside of the outlandish contracts of the military industrial complex.
It's probably because functionally speaking the "elite" capture most of the corruption money at the highest levels, and won't tolerate the inefficiency of low level corruption.
We don't get it because we expect it. We get it because history repeats.
Which is why we setup ours to be limited in power and why, as time goes on and that power expands, it gets worse and worse and why stuff like POTUS elections are now life and death when they used to be largely figure heads.
I met friends there looking for any possible way to come to Canada or the US largely to escape the systematic corruption which exists in some Balkan countries.
Would anybody move from Serbia to USA/Canada if they where equally wealthy? What if Serbia was even wealthier but still more corrupt?
It works the same in every country, from Japan to Russia to Germany to the USA to Venezuela.
It's the principal-agent problem, writ large.
I live in both the US and Germany (roughly 50/50) and the level of corruption is about the same in both places.
A lot of it is so ingrained in the culture you don't register it anymore. It gets automatically filed under "the way things work here" and becomes relatively invisible.
That is not quite true. Historically, the quality of both government and corruption varied ... and goverments worldwide also did quite a lot of good.
The "all of government is always bad" is pure ideological flex.
If that weren't true, you could show me a large, industrialized country that has very low governmental corruption. You can't. There aren't any.
That being said, in general corruption in western countries is massively lower then elsewhere. They actually function well with low levels of corruption in general.
The big corruption tend to be on the east.
The corruption in western nations is more sophisticated, and is better at hiding in plain sight. The type in the east is more furtive, probably out of an effort to "save face".
They differ in style, but not degree.
Over here we call it special euphemisms like "lobbying" and "regulatory capture" instead of "bribery" and "kickbacks". It makes people regard it differently, giving it an air of respectability.
Given the size of the corruption industry in the US, this was inevitable, as it would need a surface level of legitimacy to be able to attract and employ the sheer numbers of people who operate the machinery of the flows of bribery money from industry to servile lawmakers.
Why do you think there are so few major retailers in the US? Media companies? ISPs? Insurance companies? Hospitals? Health care networks? Pharmacies? Pharmaceutical companies? Grocery stores? Food manufacturers?
It's not lack of supply or lack of demand. Many people wish to manufacture cheap insulin or build better ISPs or grocery stores.
Soon it will be the same with social networks. They already achieved it with app stores, which is the only meaningful publishing today, apps having killed the web.
Anything that has broad social appeal or need which subsequently results in large recurring cash flows will get regulated upon so that the cash doesn't flow to anyone the existing power structure doesn't want to enrich. (I have a separate theory that the current anti-Musk backlash is engineered because of an accidental failure of the system implementing this longstanding policy, due to the double whammy of unexpected breakout success of both Tesla stock and SpaceX operational scaling simultaneously. He sure is lucky he has a US passport whilst trying to do what he's doing.)
People like to ascribe this to "late stage capitalism" but for every dysfunctional industry lacking real competition or consumer choice, I can point to a bad set of laws or regulations paid for by that industry. It's a failure of the state to do its job to protect end users and opportunity and liberty.
When copyright was about to expire, Disney went to the legislature with checkbook in hand. Laws are for sale in the USA.
Why does the illusion of consumer choice become more and more farcical every year?
The US regulatory machine is totally corrupt in almost everything it touches. We just reclassified it so it seems less shady than it is, but the story of Comcast and the FCC stands clear as just one of many illustrations.
(Or Bell in Canada, or DTAG in Germany. It works the same everywhere.)
Because free markets don't actually stop the accumulation of private market power. The natural state of most markets is monopoly or oligopoly due to efficiencies of scale and collusion. Governments at least provide some degree of legal oversight to this private power.
All of the large incumbents in those industries in western countries are protected by laws paid for, engineered, and often literally written by those industries. Places where this is not the case are the exception, not the rule.
The monopolies are held in place by government license or other regulations used to suppress competition. It's not a natural state.
Orders of magnitude differences in corruption matters a lot.
Like rent control.
If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret/ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.
My critique is that instead of poking wholes in it, debating if eggs are or are not healthy and such, we really just normalized massive portions and fried/fast food/soft drinks/sugar in everything/etc. Which completely misses the spirit of what the pyramid was even aspiring to be. We didn’t even consider the pyramid when we made our food choices. We just allowed our gluttony to lead us where it may. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. We knew very well we were making poor choices along the way, but gave in to our desires. (Using “we” as collective US generalization, not trying to speak about anyone specifically, I’m sure someone here has a counterpoint but the obesity stats represent us collectively )
https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-1...