Here's hoping that now that we've stopped our incorrect clock, the next step may very well be setting it correctly.
Being obese as a kid is almost causal for being obese later in life[1] as becoming obese screws up a lot of your bodies biology permenantly. You can of course change and become healthier but many lingering symptoms linger regardless of you losing weight. While still 70% obese adults were not obese as children 80% of obese children end up being obese.
Open to other ideas but school meals and peoples relationship with food is extremely important to maintaining weight in my experience.
There might also be a genetic factor, why japanese are less obese or overweight, because the difference for diabetes patients between US and japan is a lot smaller.
Trust primarily by virtue of authority is a bad quality to inculcate in a populace.
Yes, any alternative epistemological basis means you have to deal with Aunt Glenda or Uncle Roy who didn't graduate high school being convinced they're smarter than 'those scientists'.
But we're sliding dangerously close to outsourcing common sense, and the solution isn't encouraging more prostration to expert authority.
It's developing more widespread reasoning from first principles (coupled with curiosity and self-awareness of ones own intellectual limitations).
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.
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.
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?
But people used the 90s food pyramid everywhere and that was the only one popularly known. The myplate stuff, I guess it wasn’t advertised well by the government, who knows.
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.
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.
And no, I'm not anti-vaccines. Just like I'm not anti modern drugs. But that 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.
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.
You still owe me a court trial if you want to act on that in a way that reduces my rights. Prove that my individual choices are affecting anyone.
> if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol. It's for the common good, obviously, and there are zero arguments against this. Why do we allow drinking? At the very least we should ban _public_ drinking. There's no sense in socially allowing this to occur.
The actions that cause possible bad societal harms from drinking alcohol are indeed banned or heavily penalized. Drinking and Driving. Public Intoxication. Domestic Abuse. Child Endangerment and more.
Really. We should just stop selling it. It's insane that you think you can write a set of rules that somehow prevents harm. It merely manages the consequences of the harms. Your court cases cannot bring back the dead.
Why do we tolerate this yet take a hard line stance on far less important issues?
How did Prohibition work out? Is it still going? /Why not?/
You might want to read up on the principle of informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics#Informed_consen...
> After receiving and understanding this information, the patient can then make a fully informed decision to either consent or refuse treatment.
You are overly simplifying vaccines as if they do not affect individuals individually. They absolutely do, for so many reasons, like allergies. But even if that wasn't the case, _all_ vaccines carry some risk/benefit tradeoff, and each individual is entirely in their right to weigh this for themselves.
Also did we learn nothing from covid?
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.
If so that’s ideological insanity and probably exactly why anti-vax is a rising problem: Your zealousness creates it.
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.
Your same logic could be applied to food. Hungry people are suffering. Why don't we apply the same "overly motivated interference" to this issue that we did to COVID?
for most of human history, half of kids died before reaching adulthood.
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.
The American cult of personality is ridiculous. The only winning move is not to play.
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.
It would sound more scientific and less anti-vaxxer if you said “concern about secondary effects like astrological contamination”
And yes - if kids have had serious impacts to vaccines parents should be told and providers should encourage reporting into vaers
I put autism there because it’s the most commonly used anecdote when discussing this. I’m not saying take the vax away. Eg if mmrv is the big bad vax for autism - change its schedule to be given after 2 yrs after autism tests.
On second thoughts I should have said “concern for alleged secondary effects”.
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.
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.
This, obviously.
Pathetic
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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
> There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. [interviewer pushes back, brings up polio vaccine] So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
> The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. [...] That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”
Not going quote the whole thing because it's long, but he repeatedly drives home his point that all vaccines are inherently unsafe, and the injuries and deaths they cause always outweigh their effectiveness against disease.
- https://lexfridman.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-transcript/
> I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.
> If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.
- https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-way-forward/hffh-th... timestamp 11:54, 13:30
This one is interesting because the interviewer prompts him with something like "we aren't anti-vaccine, we just want to make sure they're safe" and he does not agree, he repeatedly says, with no qualification, "tell everyone not to vaccinate their children".
I don't believe he has ever voluntarily made a positive public comment about any vaccine. He did during his confirmation hearing, but he was obviously heavily incentivized to do so. During that hearing he did not say his opinion had changed, he simply lied about all past comments and claimed they never happened.
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?
Here's a site where you can view vaccine schedules across Europe: https://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu/
The only outlier is Hepatitis A, which is still recommended in some European countries. On the reverse side, the meningococcal vaccine is commonly scheduled in Europe but not in the US.
One of the vaccines made strictly optional was for dengue, which is not really a thing in denmark since I think they don't have that many mosquitos due to weather.
However, in the US, mosquitos and tropical weather are common for a large part of the population.
Point being, a huge country with a huge variety of climates and diseases shouldn't follow the lead of a small country with a fairly homogenous weather and disease pattern.
Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a choice.
Why is this bad? From one of the threads - "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."
OK, then there won't be grounds for lawsuits or lawsuits will be easily dismissed.
"you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later" - This logic can be applied to literally any product, be it a medicine, a vaccine, or any consumer good. Somehow pharma companies are able to sell any other drug without going into bankruptcy.
To clarify, this is an example of RFK's lunacy, not the user's opinion to be voted on.
A preprint citing 2 studies.
With serious studies showing the opposite. You also seem to ignore that fever is a major, and well-proven cause of birth defects and these kinds of fake announcements based on no solid proof could lead part of the population to simply not take any fever-reducing medication by not being knowledgeable on which medicines are NSAID or not.
All of this because of a promise that in the first 6 months of the mandate RFK would find "the great cause of autism", this was not because of a new study suddenly discovered.
This implies a causal relationship.
This is where it would help if the government would do the responsible thing and quantify the probability and talk about the risks of not taking medicine if you're pregnant and have a high fever. The fact that they aren't is a clear sign that this is absurd propaganda.
He is continuously spouting non-sense not including aggresive anti-vaccine stance, hydrochloroquine curing COVID-19 and that pesticides makes kids go transgender [2]. Yes, you definitely should know all of that and be careful, because the secretary of health has said so.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-circumcision-linked-auti... [2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/rfk-jr-fact-chec...
Don't mealy mouth it. He didn't say anything so nuanced as "be informed and careful".
He actually said it should be "minimized or avoided". Point blank. And then he said it should be "avoided entirely during pregnancy". It was only over a month later, when the WHO was clarifying that there was no conclusive evidence, and that acetaminophen is the safest pain relief to use during pregnancy, that he started suggesting "working with your physician".
Don't present RFK Jr's takes as reasonable. They're not.
> He cited the studies
He cited one fringe study that was discredited because it didn't consider confounding factors.
I personally avoid all meds that aren't prescribed. I haven't taken a Tylenol or Advil or Sudafed or anything like that in years. I take some vitamin supplements and occasionally (but rarely) will use aspirin for a headache.
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...
Obviously I feel like he should be providing his sources.
This is wildly inaccurate. He was photographed wading in Rock Creek in Washington, D.C, behavior prohibited by the parks service due to high levels of bacteria, yes. Is it a sewer? No.
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...
When you literally live on the farm where the cow is milked, there is less benefit to pasteurization, yes. Unless you want us to live like the Amish, then let's keep our pasteurized milk, OK?
If you’re giving your kid 2.5x the listed maximum dose of a medication, that’s on you.
> a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose
Sure, and even a small drink of alcohol can poison a kid. Something being OK for adults doesn’t make it OK for kids. Read the packaging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The food pyramid wasn't really used in recent years by the US government, and changed to "MyPlate" in 2011, and if you actually read its guidelines nothing on there is terribly offensive.
The food pyramid hasn't been a thing for more than a decade. He did bring it back.
> Who else would you congratulate for this specific action?
The people who pushed for stuff like this more than a decade ago, but conservatives opposed it because it was done by a black lady.
If that's not who you're referring to, please correct me.
It is unlikely that if you are old enough to vote that you do not remember that Michelle Obama tried to make a more healthy food criteria, and as such it’s very easy to assume that you are acting in bad faith when you say something about RFK Jr that is objectively not true.
I don’t know much at all about Michelle’s actions. Similarly, I don’t know much about Melania’s actions. You say she tried to - so… she didn’t do it? If not, I don’t see how this makes my comment “objectively untrue”?
I have not seen the pyramid with bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the base pushed for at least ~20 years. Maybe it was 25-30 years ago when I saw it pushed seriously in school and even then I did not see people taking it seriously outside of those lessons, as in people actively calling it questionable.
Where in the world was this old pyramid still being pushed?
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.
The food pyramid was removed in 2011 and replaced with MyPlate, which was much more reasonable than the food pyramid. Of course, it was heavily criticized by conservatives because they claimed it was a “nanny state”.
But of course, like everyone in Trump’s circle, RFK Jr. rebrands someone else’s work, pretends he is the first person to ever suggest eating healthy, and then every stupid Trump voter with the apparent memory retention of a goldfish acts like he was the first person to ever suggest eating healthy.
This is the guy famous for having and being proud of his brain worm.
If he was famous to you before the Trump admin, that's because you're an anti-vaxxer.
[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.
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?
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).
Pretty sure nobody reputable has ever said “eat less protein”
I know it’s important to have an informative guideline, but isn’t it strangely reminiscent of “just say no”?
https://www.familyconsumersciences.com/2011/06/usda-food-pyr...
But the framing of the site is problematic to me.
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.
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.
Unfortunately their stances on vaccines, supplements, and mental health make are still awful