This is false, in the 90s when I grew up there was no such criterion, and the posters of the pyramid prominently depicted sliced white bread.
The worst part of the food pyramid was the indication to use all fats and oils sparingly. There's never been any point in which the evidence suggested that olive oil or other monounsaturated fats should be avoided
Grains are cheap and energy dense, if your goal is to feed a large population it makes a lot of sense to put them at the base of the pyramid, that's what will keep you alive, as in, not starving. Higher up are fruits and vegetables, also cheap, they will provide with nutrients that you need to stay healthy on top of the calories that will keep you alive. Higher up are animal products, expensive but rich in proteins and a few other nutrients that are a bit lacking in the base layers, they help you get stronger and more performant in addition to healthy and alive. On top are pleasure foods, not really necessary for your body, but enjoyable.
I take it like a mirror of the "hierarchy of needs" pyramid rather than nutritional advice for people with effectively unlimited resources.
When I saw it in my local village's clinic it makes sense because it actually encourages eating some meat and fruit instead of none, which is the norm here because of poverty.
Citation please or I'm calling extreme bullshit. Everything I've ever read has argued for putting more nutrient dense fruits and vegetables as the basis for a healthy diet.
More importantly, I think the nutrition community was woefully naive to the point of being negligent when they tried to defend the food pyramid. One quote I heard was "When we were recommending lower far intake, we never imagined Snackwells." Well, why TF not??? It should have been blatantly obvious that by demonizing fat and making people feel like carbs were "free" that companies would react appropriately and come up with fat-free, sugar-stuffed replacements that had a huge amount of calories, left you feeling unsatiated, and tasted like sweet cardboard. Probably even worse was frankenfood like Olestra.
I agree with the original point - while I think the field of nutrition science has improved a lot over the past decade, they have a ton to answer for and never did an appropriate "mea culpa" for all the great harm they caused.
As for whole grains vs fruit vs vegetables, here's a SR and MA of studies looking at different food groups and the RR of all cause mortality: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
Three servings of whole grains per day: 0.79 (21% reduction in ACM) Three servings of vegetables per day: 0.89 (11% reduction in ACM) Three servings of fruit per day: 0.90 (10% reduction in ACM)
So the evidence seems to support the suggestion that consumers should focus on whole grain consumption as a base for their diet.
pic from wikipedia named USDA pyramid 1995-2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#/medi...
#/media/File:USDA_Food_Pyramid.gif){kind=link}
Even with that first sentence though, the base of that shitty food pyramid really just doesn't talk about "whole grains" - it calls it the "bread, cereal, rice and pasta" group, with a graphic that includes spaghetti, crackers, a baguette, a bowl of cereal, etc. And having lived through that time when the food pyramid was taught in school, they certainly weren't delineating between highly refined flours and things like oatmeal, brown rice, quinoa, etc.
looks like I agree with you on this part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41964513
Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules).
It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me.
The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.
Look at the dose response curve for wholegrain consumption in this bad boy (and yes, it’s looking at whole cereal grains, not including fruits and vegetables). Greater consumption associated with better outcomes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it.
I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them.
(I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)
https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525
I bookmarked another video, but it has been made private since I watched it.
Here is a very illuminating moment: the rice has already been pounded, then winnowed (the separated hulls removed), but there are still many kernels that need to be hulled (roughly one kernel in every 150 or 200 kernels), so the rice is put back in the mortar for another round of pounding. There is more pounding to do to make the rice edible, but already most of the bran is off the rice (and thrown away along with the hulls). (When only a few unhulled kernels remain, she removes them one by one with her fingers.) This supports my assertion that it is impossible with traditional methods to get the hulls off when leaving most or even a significant fraction of the bran on the rice. Again: you need precision machines that only became available in Europe in the 1800s and in East Asia in the 1900s to get the hulls off (which I think you really need to do if you eat rice every day and want to keep your teeth) while leaving most of the bran on the kernel. I.e., people in traditional rice cultures did not have the ability to consume anywhere close to as much rice bran as is possible by eating modern brown rice.
my humble research found that diffs in nutrition between whole grains and refined grains carbs is very small compared to say whole grain to some complex carbs from leaf veggies. The same goes to glycemic index, satiety index, etc.
(Maybe we should think of a word that means "carbs that the human body can efficiently convert into glucose or fructose" and try to spread that new word. "Insulinogens"?)
yes, because they consists of 90%-95% of water, then if you cook them, water evaporates and you get some amount of carbs.
But leaf veggies is one side of spectrum, with refined carbs on another, there are bunch of stuff in between.
this is not my reading of that study.
This is exact example of junk science.
What differences in goals and methodologies have you identified that you believe renders them so different that they cannot be summated?
Not sure what you mean by “no indications how balanced and what components where in diets”, you’ll have to clarify.
When I joined a Christian Health Sharing ministry, they determined that I needed remedial help, due to hypertension and dyslipidemia. They assigned me to monthly virtual meetings with a dietician. The dietician's advice horrified me, because it would've made me sicker, and exacerbated my conditions. I approached the ministry's administrators, requested a replacement dietician, and they replaced her alright. The new dietician had basically the same credentials and the same letters after her name, but she was way more flexible, listened to my reasoning, and supported my choices with encouragement.
My parents followed every "diet fad" in the 1970s-1980s, from 2% milk, to margarine, to yolk-less-egg-whites, to reducing red meat, to low-sodium everythings, to bottled fluoridated water. It was sheer torture and disgusting. My mother didn't know the first thing about flavor or pleasure in cooking, and never used the spices in her rack. Our food was always bland. For breakfast she'd slap down a jug of milk, a box of Chex, a bowl and a spoon, and abandon me to go do housework. I would sit there and read the mendacious lies known as "Nutrition Panel" on the side, and simply stewed in my resentment for the whole thing. It's a travesty.
Chex, I suppose it depends on whether it was wholegrain or not. Wholegrain cereal is associated with pretty good health benefits, refined not so much.
So why wouldn’t replacing butter with margarine be a positive step for one’s cardiovascular risk profile?
Surely that’s both a large enough cohort and a large enough effect size to change one’s diet?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
It's almost as if all of these studies are looking at tiny effects that they can't adequately measure, and contradicting each other.
The other study I'm mentioning :
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
If yes, do you believe it would be expected to see heterogenous outcomes in studies that don’t disambiguate whole grain and refined carbohydrates when replacing SFA?
If yes, then there’s clearly no contradiction in the above studies. If no for any of the above, I’d love to hear the argument.
Also, just as I was mentioning in other comments, I think there is a good chance this reduction of the problem to just whole grain - refined grain is unlikely to tell the full picture. I don't see a priori why eating whole wheat would be exactly as healthy/unhealthy as eating whole rice, or oats, or millet, or barley, or quinoa or any of the many other unrelated plants we call "grains". Maybe we should prefer certain grains and avoid others, regardless of the whole/refined distinction; this difference might also depend on genetic factors, with certain populations perhaps being better suited to certain grains than others. It is very much possible as well that certain grains are better eaten whole, and certain others better eaten refined, say if there are substances in certain husks that are problematic over long time or in certain quantities and so on.
And this is not even going into other factors, like rates of contamination of the grains with pesticides/fertilizers/naturally-occuring substances in certain soils; handling, washing, and preservation; cooking differences; and probably many others that I'm not even thinking of.
And while some of these effects will naturally lead to heterogenous outcomes in studies that don't control for them, this doesn't increase my confidence in those studies. The fact that there are an extreme number of possible confounding variables in everything to do with nutrition is basically why nutrition science is almost hopeless as an entire endeavour: we can only reliably find extremely strong effects ("lack of vitamin C causes scurvy"), and even then we need a bit of luck. The rest is built on a house of cards: every new medical or biological discovery tends to upend nutritional studies and what they control for.
We should also learn from history that replacing our diets based on "nutritional science" has generally been unlikely to yield good health results, as long as we're not already obese. For example, nutritional science kept recommending replacing SFA with any UFA, and ended up killing many, many people because it didn't know that trans unsaturated fatty acids are actually worse than SFAs for overall health.
We can reasonably expect that similar things will be discovered in the future about other parts of margarine, and that eating traditional foods with a long history of safe human consumption is a much safer path, be they olive oil or butter or lard.
As for nutrition science and its effect on health, just because one intervention had deleterious effects doesn’t mean that you can claim that the net effect of nutrition science on health has been net negative. Again, see no reason to believe that without actual evidence supporting it.
Nutrition science told us that we should start fortifying flour to prevent some horrendous diseases, and the net result of that has been far greater than the problems caused by trans fat consumption, for example.
I see no reason to believe that traditional foods are safer than novel foods. In fact, provided both are equally health promoting during the reproductive window, then it’s more likely that a given novel food is better for longevity than a traditional one.
As far as I know, the main mechanism for that is reduction of HDL-c. However, the study you cite found no reduction of HDL-C from TFA substitution.
> PUFA reduces LDL-c by a greater degree and there are no known issues like there are with TFA, so substituting SFA for PUFA seems like a no-brainer.
Key word being "known issues". One of the major issues with nutrition science is this grouping of vastly different foods based on a single simple category of substance. There are a lot of different PUFAs, and even more different specific oils or fat solids containing PUFAs, and there is no reason to believe that they are completely interchangeable in our nutrition. UFAs were once thought to be the same, before the important distinction between PUFAs and TFAs (and the still unclear position of non-TFA MUFAs) was discovered and recognized.
> As for nutrition science and its effect on health, just because one intervention had deleterious effects doesn’t mean that you can claim that the net effect of nutrition science on health has been net negative. Again, see no reason to believe that without actual evidence supporting it.
Yes, some basic findings in nutrition science did improve things worldwide health. The discovery of vitamins and various other micronutrients was by far the most important. The discovery of dietary fiber and its roles allowed nutrition science to course correct a number of bad recommendations from the earlier era. In very specialized fields, such as high performance athletes, it also show reproducible, predictable results (though not necessarily on long-term health, just measured by competition success).
> I see no reason to believe that traditional foods are safer than novel foods. In fact, provided both are equally health promoting during the reproductive window, then it’s more likely that a given novel food is better for longevity than a traditional one.
Traditional foods have an extremely long history behind them of not being acutely harmful to at least one particular population, with traditionally passed on limits of safe amounts of consumption and safe methods of preparation. They have been consumed by populations that lived with much reduced medical care than today, so they are known to be resilient even in the absence of medical interventions, which often confound nutritional studies, especially in older adults. They are also much more likely to be well adapted to the particular genetics of a certain population, unlike nutritional advice which is almost entirely "universal".
One of the main sources of nutritional discoveries has in fact been the study of traditional diets. From vitamins to fiber to fermented foods' effects on gut microbiota, the discovery has always come from trying to understand why a particular population is thriving nutritionally.
The main drawback of traditional foods is that the mechanism for passing down information on safe preparation and consumption was informal, and can be easily lost. They also tend to be hard to create industrially, so they are likely to be much harder or more expensive to consume compared to modern industrial food products. However, for people who can afford it, they are by far the better option compared to the uncertainty and contradictions of modern nutritional advice.
[Note: this is the same account as tsimiones, I'm not trying to hide behind some new name, it's just related to some software on my work PC]
Yes, there are no known issues. You can speculate that there might be, but we could equally speculate that they’re actually superfoods and we don’t know it yet. At the end of the day, speculation is all it is so I believe it’s most sensible to apply the principle of indifference and look only at what we do know. That is, margarine is a sensible replacement for butter on the current evidence.
Because of antagonistic pleiotropy, we can actually make an a priori argument that given two foods that are equally health promoting within the reproductive window (I.e. it’s not killing or neutering people before the age of ~50), then probability holds that the food to which we are least adapted is actually more likely to promote longevity than the ancestral food.
Because adaptations are on net more likely to be antagonistically pleiotropic than not, foods to which we are most adapted are more likely than not making a trade off in favour of reproductive success over longevity. Since we don’t have these adaptations to novel foods, this concern does not apply to them.
Therefore, given butter and margarine are both similar in their effects on reproductive success, with no further information at all we should favour margarine. The fact there are studies confirming this is just icing on the cake.
(And really, margarine can be plenty tasty. As a kid I actually preferred it to butter for some reason.)
https://youtu.be/reLIPoZQZ-8?si=lLXfhsdm89zlOWsI
Those commercials played multiple times a day in my childhood, and they never failed to piss me off, because they clearly demonstrated that "milk and a box of Chex" was not by any means a "balanced breakfast".
Policy and advocacy is deceptive, dishonest, and lacks nuance.
Reduced fat is an interesting one. If you actually look at what Keys was investigating all the way back in the mid 20th century, the hypothesis was always that saturated fat increased CVD risk. The translation of that into policy and marketing aimed at total fat cannot be placed entirely at the feet of mainstream nutrition science.
As to the claims that sugar is addictive, this is unsupported - sugar does not meet the DSM-V criteria for addictive substances based on current evidence (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-8077-9_...)
As for added sugar - again, you’re labelling policy decisions as nutrition science. The DGs that I’m aware of recommend as little added sugar as possible, but when you’re making policy you have to strike a balance between strict enough to make a difference, but not so restrictive that no one listens. That’s different from what mainstream nutrition science would claim (which is indeed that there are no benefits to added sugar and several risks).
The same point applies to your claim that nutrition science has a role in getting people to adhere to satiating diets. No, nutrition science is to help us understand what those diets might look like. It is not responsible for getting populations to adhere to them.