[HN Gopher] Eat Real Food
___________________________________________________________________
Eat Real Food
Author : atestu
Score : 337 points
Date : 2026-01-07 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (realfood.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (realfood.gov)
| jostmey wrote:
| Makes sense to me! And poor diet is probably one of the biggest
| problems in the United States
| timeon wrote:
| Hand in hand with car dependency.
| jzkdroid wrote:
| Are we going to subsidize a broad array fruits/vegetables
| instead of corn to the point they become cheaper than processed
| foods? If not I think many americans will ignore this pyramid
| and do as they currently do.
| throwfaraway4 wrote:
| Makes sense. Now make protein affordable.
| dewfaced wrote:
| Soylent Green is people!
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Mmm.. IMO we have the opposite problem: Meat is _too_ cheap due
| to subsidies , compared to its environmental and ethical
| impact.
| observationist wrote:
| The disparity between prices in blue states and red states is
| bonkers - a 10-15% difference in costs. Under $2.00 per dozen
| eggs (on sale, ~$3.00 normally, seems to be trending down too?)
| where I'm at contrasted to $4.00 or higher in big cities. The
| closer you live to ranches and farms, the cheaper the meat, as
| well.
|
| If you go to farmers and ranchers directly, source your protein
| well, make a monthly trip out to the boonies, cross state
| lines, etc, you can get some serious savings. Hopefully things
| trend down this year, things have been rough over the last
| several years.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Ironically, since the pandemic junk foods have gone up in
| price much higher relative to meat and eggs.
| Alupis wrote:
| Beef may be crazy prices right now, but chicken is still very
| cheap and very healthy. Chicken breast here in a moderate HCOL
| area can be found for around $2.50/lb.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Similarly, we usually buy several Turkeys for the deep
| freezer when they're on sale, I also find pork close to $1/lb
| a few times a year. Eggs are usually pretty well priced but I
| tend to prefer pasture raised.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| And 100 years from now, will we still call it the New Pyramid? :)
|
| I guess we still call it New York...
| samrus wrote:
| And the New Deal
| jhbadger wrote:
| There is a similar problem with genomic sequencing - when new
| twchnologies began to replace traditional Sanger sequencing
| about twenty years ago, it was (and still is) called "next
| generation sequencing" (NGS). But the field is still advancing.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Great! How will the reductions in consumer protection, health,
| FDA, etc. - by this current administration impact that?
|
| https://www.food-safety.com/articles/11004-a-2025-timeline-o...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I see how the article is framed, but I see a lot of good things
| in that timeline: MAHA Commission assessing
| health risks from food ingredients and chemicals and developing
| a strategy to combat childhood chronic disease Closing
| the GRAS loophole Phasing out synthetic food dyes
| $235 million specifically aimed at improving nutrition,
| controlling food additives and addressing food safety $15
| million specifically for modernizing infant formula oversight
| $7 million to support critical laboratory operations
| russdill wrote:
| Anything with money amounts, my next question is how much
| money were we previously spending on that thing.
| websiteapi wrote:
| If simply spending money worked USA would be the most
| healthy.
| russdill wrote:
| Look, we could spend a fraction of what we do, but then
| there would be people who get things for free or even
| fraudulently. You can see just how bad that would be from
| an American mindset.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Roughly $20-30 million/year specifically aimed at
| nutrition, additives and diet-related food safety. So this
| is a 8-10x increase.
| russdill wrote:
| I'm not seeing numbers supporting that
| https://www.fda.gov/media/166050/download
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > $235 million specifically aimed at improving nutrition,
| controlling food additives and addressing food safety
|
| Musk's disastrous months with the admin defunded and ended a
| program bringing local farmers' produce et al to public
| schools around my state so I'm a little bitter seeing this
| one.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Even then, 95% of it is probably already earmarked /
| targeted for some friend's grift.
| pimlottc wrote:
| This website is far too complicated, just show a clear, labeled
| image of the new pyramid. This is designed to scare people, not
| inform them.
| knollimar wrote:
| I don't think they have a visually representative pyramid. The
| guidelines seem at ends with their half baked image imo
| pimlottc wrote:
| There is a pyramid that you can see entirely only at two
| precise scroll points, but it's not labeled with any
| recommended amounts.
| knollimar wrote:
| My point is that its a triangle filled from 3 sides; it's
| not vertically tiered.
|
| Edit: I really set up that conjoined triangle joke
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Lol good one. Anything matching . _real_.\\.gov$ can be discarded
| as BS these days...
|
| Edit:
|
| Actually make that simply .*\\.gov$
|
| It's unbelievable to which point this clown show has permanently
| dismantled US soft power. Guess they think they have enough hard
| power to compensate. What with all that good raw milk and meat
| they're eating...
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Ironic that a steak is one of the three things showing up on the
| landing page. Is that the beef lobby money coming in?
|
| I enjoy an occasional steak but if the goal is to improve diet of
| masses, it's not the food I'd put at the center.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Whole milk, cheese, and steak are not the usual foods I
| associate with health. Unfortunately this is not backed by
| scientific evidence.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Red meat has a link to colorectal cancer.
| CompoundEyes wrote:
| I visited a heart doctor at Duke research medical center a
| few years back. His comments then were that dairy products
| were the most inflammatory foods for humans and a major
| contributor to heart disease by gunking up our bloodstreams.
| Finnucane wrote:
| RFKjr, the guy who feeds roadkill to his brain worm, thinks
| more saturated fat = good, 'seed oil' = bad.
| overgard wrote:
| RFKjr is generally an idiot, but saturated fat = good, seed
| oil = bad is actually correct. For instance:
| https://health.clevelandclinic.org/seed-oils-are-they-
| actual...
|
| Saturated fats are good because they're more stable than
| poly-unsaturated fats for instance.
|
| If you do consume a seed oil (which you really shouldn't --
| there's no benefit), you should get a cold-pressed one. But
| that would be more expensive, so if you're paying more you
| might as well just get something good like avacado oil or
| coconut oil.
| Finnucane wrote:
| "inflammation"! It's always "inflammation". What a crock.
| overgard wrote:
| You want more inflammation?
|
| Inflammation is a real thing you can measure in the body,
| you know. (C Reactive Protein for instance). It's behind
| a lot of diseases.
|
| The reason WHY it's "always" inflammation is because the
| standard american diet CREATES a lot of inflammation.
| You'll probably have to worry about hearing that buzzword
| a lot less if people ate better..
| everdrive wrote:
| This is a great example of how harming your own credibility
| can damage an otherwise correct and uncontroversial
| message. RFK Jr. has surrounded himself in controversy, and
| that controversy is really dominating a lot of this
| conversation and drowning out the message. Given how he's
| acted, I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of him,
| even if this particular food pyramid seems to be a good
| move that would itself be uncontroversial if provided by a
| different messenger.
| overgard wrote:
| True, but, I think this is also an important lesson in
| considering the arguments not just a source. Nobody is
| ever 100% right or 100% wrong, and just leaning on
| arguments of authority is lazy thinking.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Just Google "seed oils health" and look at the reputable
| results (Cleveland Clinic, various universities, Mayo
| Clinic, etc), and you'll see opinions across the board.
| Some say "Bad". Some say "Not bad". Some say "Unsure".
|
| Jury is still out on this one.
|
| And I think lumping all seed oils into one category isn't
| helping. Maybe canola oil is OK and sesame oil is not. Or
| vice versa.
| overgard wrote:
| I think it's generally fair to lump them together,
| because the types of fats you get in them are similar.
|
| The history of cotton seed oil is interesting. After
| reading that, I would challenge people to think if that's
| really something they'd want in their body. Other than
| cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed oils and a lot
| of upside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottonseed_oil#E
| conomic_histor...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Looking at the article, I'm not sure I see the problem.
|
| > Other than cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed
| oils and a lot of upside
|
| The taste of food in certain recipes (that don't involve
| cooking the oil) varies widely with the oil used. In some
| recipes, canola oil tastes better than olive oil (by a
| significant margin - no one would eat it with olive oil).
|
| Cost was never a factor for me (even as a student). Oil
| is amongst the least expensive things in the food I cook.
| overgard wrote:
| I mean, what you want to put in your body is up to you,
| but an industrial byproduct that involves a lot of
| chemistry seems like something I'm not a fan of. Also if
| you go past the history a bit: "The FDA released its
| final determination that Partially Hydrogenated Oils
| (PHOs), which include partially hydrogenated cottonseed
| oil, are not Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) in
| 2015."
|
| Olive oil definitely has a flavor, but other oils are
| pretty neutral (I cook with avacado oil because of the
| high smoke point and I don't notice it really effecting
| anything). Also you have to keep in mind that those seed
| oils have a neutral flavor because they've been through a
| deodorizing chemical process, otherwise they'd
| taste/smell rancid.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The link you gave doesn't support your claim that saturated
| fat is good.
|
| In fact, from the very same site, here's another article
| saying it's not:
| https://health.clevelandclinic.org/saturated-fats-
| finding-a-...
|
| Saturated fat is OK in moderate amounts, but if you eat too
| much, it drives up your cholesterol because your body
| converts saturated fat into cholesterol[1][2].
|
| The issue I have with this new food pyramid is the guidance
| ignores the danger of saturated fat. It lists "meats" and
| "full-fat dairy" among sources of "healthy fats", and
| that's just not true. In the picture that shows sources of
| protein/fat, 11 out of 13 of the items are animal-based
| fats. With a giant ribeye steak, cheese, butter, and whole
| milk specifically (not just milk), they're simply not
| giving an accurate picture of healthy fat sources.
|
| I personally don't think seed oils are bad, but even if
| they were, it does not follow that saturated fat is good.
| The evidence shows otherwise, for one thing, plus it's not
| like seed oils and saturated fat are the only two kinds of
| fat. There are plenty of unsaturated fats which aren't seed
| oils.
|
| ---
|
| [1]
| https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000838.htm
|
| [2] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-
| eating/eat-s...
| margalabargala wrote:
| This isn't true, per your own link.
|
| The point the Cleveland Clinic page makes is that seed oils
| tend to be what's used in ultra-processed foods, and those
| are bad for you. So if you avoid seed oils, you wind up
| avoiding the bad things as a second order effect.
|
| Aside from that it's just hand-wavey "they use chemicals to
| make it! It doesn't have nutrients beyond the fat!".
| There's nothing to indicate that using sunflower or peanut
| oil is any worse for you than using walnut oil.
|
| The connection between omega-6 fats and inflammation is a
| whole lot more tenuous than the link between ultra-
| processed foods and inflammation.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Steak's not great for you, but in moderation is probably a
| better source of calories than refined grains, which should be
| treated more or less the same as candy.
| overgard wrote:
| High protein, nutrient dense. Definitely want to get grass-fed
| or pasture raised though. Shouldn't eat it all the time because
| it has a high calorie content, but steak isn't bad. They're
| probably showing a steak to indicate that eating meat is good,
| not just steak in general. Keto and carnivore diets have been
| shown to be pretty good for people with inflammatory
| conditions.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Worth noting that ruminants have less variance between "good
| diets" and "bad diets" for the animals than other animal
| protein sources. IE: you're better off with a grain fed steak
| than an unnaturally fed non-ruminant animal.
|
| As to the calories, yes calories count, but the fact that it
| is calorie dense doesn't necessarily mean you should avoid it
| so much as be aware if you are mixing sources and having
| excessive meals. I know a lot of people on carnivore diets
| for inflammatory and diabetic control and the total calorie
| intake is less of an issue in those cases. Even with a pound
| of steak and a dozen eggs a day, weight loss is still
| happening for overweight diabetics on carnivore diets.
|
| Just meat is very sating and impossible for most people to
| overeat in practice... at least from my own experience and
| exposure. The relative mono diet also helps with this.
| overgard wrote:
| Yeah, I agree, I'm not really a calorie counter. (I tend to
| get irritated by the "a calorie is a calorie" folk because
| nutrient quality is the most important thing). It's
| occasionally worth paying attention to calories with some
| foods though, like bacon or whatnot because it's very easy
| to eat a small volume but a lot of calories.
| tracker1 wrote:
| My advice in the various keto-carnivore and diabetic
| groups I'm in is to concentrate on getting used to the
| diet first and only start counting calories after a
| prolonged (months long) stall or gaining weight for
| multiple weeks.
|
| It's too easy to obsess, and I've experienced times where
| I'll stall when not eating enough more than eating too
| much when I'm eating clean. I have digestive issues from
| Trulicity/Ozempic and have a hard time eating enough, and
| my metabolism is highly dysfunctional... If I eat 1500
| calories a day, about my natural hunger level at this
| point, I won't lose anything, but if I eat closer to
| 3000-3400/day, I will lose weight. It seems counter-
| intuitive but it's true.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| "In over 24,000 participants from the NHANES study, high
| saturated fatty acid intake was associated with an 8% increase
| in all cause mortality risk. A meta-analysis with over
| 1,100,000 total participants showed that high intake of
| saturated fats was also correlated to a 10% increase in
| coronary heart disease mortality risk" (https://www.ahajournals
| .org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.118.31403...)
|
| (there is an argument for why this shouldn't apply to grass-fed
| meat but that is an extremely small minority of meat sold)
| tracker1 wrote:
| survey based study, correlation is not causation, and
| correlated affects not separable from other biases.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| that is an impossible standard to apply to diet-based
| research which is incredibly expensive to otherwise study
| (e.g, you need a metabolic ward and at that point you'd
| complain about small N).
|
| We know saturated fat increases LDL, we know LDL
| contributes to CVD. This is still an area of active
| research and there are small populations of people that
| don't accept the consensus but it is still very much best-
| practice keep your LDL low.
| mcswell wrote:
| If Lysenko Jr wants us all to eat steaks, he should get to work
| on either eliminating ticks, or creating a cure for alphagal
| (alpha galactose) allergy transmitted by many ticks. I've had
| to stop eating beef (my wife gives me a little bite of her
| steak once in awhile), along with lamb and pork (pork seems to
| be less of a problem than beef, but I still have to eat it in
| moderation).
|
| In case you're not familiar with this allergy, it doesn't
| behave like other food allergies: instead of getting instant
| symptoms, it hits you hours later, making it hard to figure out
| why you suddenly have hives---unless you already know about
| alpha gal.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I'm sure the government is trying. The government weaponized
| alpha-gal in the first place.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's rough... I have issues when I eat legumes and wheat...
| I still like pasta and pretty much had peanut butter every
| day of my life up to a few years ago. When I manage to stick
| to a meat centered diet I do better... but it's easy to get
| off track in social circles.
| NickC25 wrote:
| >he should get to work on either eliminating ticks, or
| creating a cure for alphagal
|
| Or he should just lobby to make high quality, lean, grass-fed
| steaks cheaper so everyone who wants to consume them can
| consume them. It's not currently cheap.
| burkaman wrote:
| The "scientific foundation" PDF does disclose several financial
| relationships with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association
| and other cow-related lobbyists.
| rcpt wrote:
| Obviously the beef lobby is involved. They are masters of
| public opinion and extremely good at what they do.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched "Let's Move!" with a
| wide-ranging plan to curb childhood obesity. The campaign took
| aim at processed foods, flagged concerns about sugary drinks, and
| called for children to spend more time playing outside and less
| time staring at screens. The campaign was roundly skewered by
| conservatives... But the strategy that Kennedy's HHS is using to
| address the problem so far--pressuring food companies to alter
| their products instead of introducing new regulations--is the
| same one that Obama relied on, and will likely fall short for the
| same reason hers did a decade ago."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/09/maha-lets...
| bruceb wrote:
| Not just pressure. Stoping SNAP benefits from funding these
| sugar and oil peddlers is a good thing.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Meta comment: The design aesthetic gives me a real "Cards Against
| Humanity" feel.
| rout39574 wrote:
| That's what struck me, seems kind of apropos.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| > Whole grains are encouraged. Refined carbohydrates are not.
| Prioritize fiber-rich whole grains and significantly reduce the
| consumption of highly processed, refined carbohydrates that
| displace real nourishment.
|
| I am consternated at the proliferation of refined grains. Here
| are my USA observations: - Grocery store or
| Amazon etc: Whole grain breads and flours are in the minority,
| but it's possible to get them - Restaurants and
| bakeries: Impossible to find whole grains; 100% refined
|
| IMO it's a no-brainer to eat the healthier stuff that has bran +
| endosperm intact instead of removing and attempting ton add back
| the micro-nutrients. (While still missing the fiber)
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| My understanding is that whole grain flour is not very shelf
| stable, ie. you have to grind it and use it within a few days
| or starts to taste bad. White flour lasts years.
|
| A small flour mill is not that expensive, I wonder why more
| places do not grind their own flour?
| samrus wrote:
| As someone with psoriotic arthritis, this is just my diet (plus
| avoiding gluten) and honestly following it has made me feel alot
| better even aside from preventing the psoriosis
|
| Good initiative from the government, i wouldnt have expected them
| to do something that messes with junk food corporations profits
| like this
| eloisius wrote:
| Yeah, I was expecting read something that made me mad, but this
| is basically how I've eaten my whole life. I've never
| subscribed to any special diet, but I like whole milk, I like
| eating meat and veggies, I don't enjoy sliced bread, and I
| avoid sugary things. I walk a lot every day. Probably thanks to
| genetics, but I've been thin my whole life and the only chronic
| issues I've had tend to be muscle-tendon things from bad
| posture while sitting at the computer, or overdoing it when I
| get into a hobby like bouldering. Near 40 and I hope I can keep
| my health and be active well into my 70s at least.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Exactly, if one eats like the top shelf of the pyramid (minus
| the milk products) this looks like autoimmune protocol diets.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| I just refer to the official Finnish nutrition guidelines, they
| seem pretty reasonable.
|
| https://www.ruokavirasto.fi/en/foodstuffs/healthy-diet/nutri...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Obesity among Finns is increasing. https://thl.fi/en/-/risk-
| factors-that-expose-finns-to-chroni...
| anttiharju wrote:
| Coincidentally, MAHA means stomach/tummy/belly in Finnish.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| I liked the Canada food guide.
|
| https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/
|
| Discussion in 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18985017
| jdoe1337halo wrote:
| I get having issues with RFK and the way the administrations
| handles health issues surrounding vaccines, but this seems pretty
| solid.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| let me first post a shallow, obligatory complaint about the
| unreadability of this submission due to egregious scrolljacking.
|
| for those interested without getting angered by weird scroll
| behavior, see below.
|
| too bad there's such a focus on animal protein/products, which
| isn't all that good if you want to design a world-wide society of
| billions of people that's going to last into the next 1000 years.
| seems like at least half of the pyramid was designed by Big Agro
| lobbyists. other than that, i guess anything's better than what
| the average american eats now.
|
| ----
|
| _Protein, Dairy, & Healthy Fats_: We are ending the war on
| protein. Every meal must prioritize high-quality, nutrient-dense
| protein from both animal and plant sources, paired with healthy
| fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat
| dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados.
|
| Protein target: 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per
| day.
|
| _Vegetables & Fruits_: Vegetables and fruits are essential to
| real food nutrition. Eat a wide variety of whole, colorful,
| nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits in their original form,
| prioritizing freshness and minimal processing.
|
| Vegetables: 3 servings per day. Fruits: 2 servings per day.
|
| _Whole Grains_ : Whole grains are encouraged. Refined
| carbohydrates are not. Prioritize fiber-rich whole grains and
| significantly reduce the consumption of highly processed, refined
| carbohydrates that displace real nourishment.
|
| Target: 2-4 servings per day.
| cpursley wrote:
| Stick with this list and kick the refined carbs, limit even
| whole grains and no sugar (including most alcohol) and it's
| actually difficult to be over 15% body fat even if you overeat
| all the rest (assuming no hormonal issues, that can throw a
| wrench into things).
| alexjplant wrote:
| Alcohol is neither a carb nor sugar and weight is largely a
| function of calories in versus calories out. All of the hand-
| wringing about HFCS and seed oils and deep fried Crisco is
| misplaced; while these things are all unhealthy in their own
| way obesity is largely a function of sedentary lifestyles and
| overeating.
|
| Nobody wants to hear that they're a lazy glutton, however, so
| pop health media conflates various causes and effects. In
| other words eating foods with higher satiety and lower
| macronutrient density and walking more is harder than
| introducing a new dietary restriction to combat the "monster
| of the week" - inflammation, microbiome imbalance, etc.
| baubino wrote:
| > weight is largely a function of calories in versus
| calories out
|
| Yes, but calories are much easier to rack up in some foods
| compared to others. There's this great exhibit I took my
| kid to see in a science museum that showed that the number
| of calories in four twinkies was equivalent to something
| like 20 pounds of carrots. Not sure if those were the exact
| numbers (it was a long time ago) but the point is that in
| the modern world it is virtually impossible to become obese
| if you are eating even large amounts of, say, baked chicken
| and steamed veggies. No obese person is overeating healthy
| foods.
| cpursley wrote:
| Please don't steam veggies, it turned several generations
| off of them. But you are correct :)
| anon291 wrote:
| Yes. As someone who's struggled with weight and finally
| approaching below 20% body fat as a man, I wish this had come
| out ten years ago. Nothing helped until I switched to this
| eating plan. It is impossible to overeat actual meat and
| veggies. (Note the actual meat part, eating processed meats
| loaded with carbs is not helpful)
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| War on protein? Why does this comment belong in a
| recommendation list?
| brokensegue wrote:
| Because this is the language of the trump administration.
| Everything needs to be momentus. The good must always be
| beating an unknown and all powerful enemy
| rubyfan wrote:
| To signal validity to the in group constituents and
| lobbyists.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Because the current administration has an overriding focus on
| self-aggrandizement and the struggle against persecution by
| hidden forces. All communications and outputs of the
| administration must pay lip service to said focus, no matter
| how unprofessional or off-topic such virtue signaling may be.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Are you not enjoying the tremendous amount of winning the
| current usa administration is doing? Can't win big without a
| nice war or two going on. War is peace, citizen.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| > egregious scrolljacking
|
| Meta but my first reaction was they hired laid off Apple.com
| developers to build this.
|
| Maybe they're trying to channel the excitement people get from
| a new iPhone rollout toward healthy foods.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It is so fitting that this particular announcement was built
| with the worst website style to emerge since the 90's
| diath wrote:
| > too bad there's such a focus on animal protein/products,
|
| Non-animal protein sources (like soy and beans) have very poor
| bioavailability.
| Teever wrote:
| Why does that one particular facet matter the most?
|
| As I understand it diets with modest amounts of animal
| protein are cheaper, healthier, and ultimately more
| sustainable for the ecosphere.
| orwin wrote:
| But non-animal proteins bio-accumulate less harmfull stuff
| (like lead) and contain more useful minerals. I hate doing
| the "the truth is in the middle" guy, but here, the correct
| diet is clearly in the middle, no?
| deinonychus wrote:
| i agree that plant proteins usually contain more beneficial
| minerals than meat, but that also certainly includes lead.
| whole plants and especially plant-based protein products
| contain lots of lead, but it's unclear if this is a huge
| problem
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91554-z#Sec5
| https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-
| sha...
| Alcor wrote:
| I've heard this claim repeated a lot, in the case of soy
| "very poor" just doesn't seem supported by the data and more
| importantly in a real world setting one particular protein
| source lacking a specific amino acid doesn't matter as much
| because it is mostly not consumed in isolation.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11171741/
| overgard wrote:
| I'm pleasantly surprised, this is actually really good. The
| reason I'm surprised is because of how corrupt the creation of
| the previous food pyramid was (the sugar industry likely paid to
| downplay the danger of sugar[1])
|
| I find when it comes to health advice, generally government
| sources can't be trusted because there's too much special
| interests and money involved. You really have to do your own
| research.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2016/09/13/493739074...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/dyor-do-your-own-...
| overgard wrote:
| Unfortunately it's pay-walled so I can't read it, I can only
| react to the headline. But yes, of course with "do your own
| research" it's "not that simple", but any student of history
| should know that you should have a very healthy skepticism of
| any official or mainstream source. For some reason we think
| in modernity that we've gotten everything right, and it's
| only in the past that the official explanations were wrong.
| My money is on the experts being wrong about a lot of things
| in this era too.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| https://archive.is/NhyjE
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| The biggest issue with sugar is that it makes stuff taste
| better which leads to overeating. Incidentally it's also the
| only downside of glutamate, it just makes stuff taste so good
| you'll eat much more than your appetite would guide you to
| sva_ wrote:
| The other downsides of both sugar and in particular glutamate
| are that you'll find other foods less sweet or having less
| depth of flavor (umami), so you'll be more likely to go for
| the processed options.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| It's a nice website, sure.
|
| But what is this administration actually doing to change
| American diets? It's going to take a little more than throwing
| up a marketing landing page with a well produced video and nice
| photos.
| elicash wrote:
| This is basically the same as the previous version, the "food
| plate" that Michelle Obama rolled out in 2011:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03plate.html
|
| It's amusing how outraged people were when Michelle Obama did
| her Let's Move campaign focused on eating healthy and exercise
| and now people are pretending it's all new.
|
| (There was also a version before that, in 2005. The
| "MyPyramid." That one emphasized exercise by having a person
| walking up a revised version of the pyramid. Though it had a
| whole giant category for "milk," admittedly as a knock against
| it. I'll grant today's did a good job in de-emphasizing dairy
| compared to 2005 and 2011.)
| criddell wrote:
| I always wish they would include a sample menu for one week that
| hits the daily recommended dose for every vitamin, mineral, fat,
| etc... without going over some calorie limit.
| bruceb wrote:
| One of the dumbest, frustrating things during Obama's
| Administration was the partisan Republican attack on Michelle
| Obama's push for healthier school lunches.
|
| Democrats should not reflexive be against this just because they
| don't like the current president or HHS secetry. Same thing with
| the restrictions on buying soda and junk food with SNAP.
|
| The supermarket is filled with processed food. Black cat/White
| cat whatever catches the mouse. The push to eat real food is
| good. Embrace it even if you don't like people behind it.
| blargthorwars wrote:
| Our kids lived the change: school meals went from decently
| school-made food with lots of variety to prepackaged stuff from
| a distributor.
|
| The intent was good....perhaps... but the processed food
| manufacturers made bank.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| The current plan, as proposed, isn't even accurate or helpful.
| It has butter under healthy fats, which it is not. "meat" is
| thoroughly vague and red meat is very different from fish and
| poultry. Red meat of all types are filled with saturated fats
| associated with cvd and ldl-c levels.
|
| It's not scientific and that's exactly what you'd expect out of
| RFK and MAHA movement.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience, this is consistent with
| multiple doctors over the years recommending high-protein, low
| carb diets. (Clarification: _low_ does not mean _no_ carb.)
|
| I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a
| purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away
| nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
|
| Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on
| SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
| bruceb wrote:
| Pure partisan spite. The gov't not spending money on candy and
| sugary drinks is good. Just like when Michelle Obama pushed for
| better school lunches.
| ecshafer wrote:
| One of the best litmus tests for Democrat or Republican I
| have found is "Should people on food stamps be able to buy
| mountain dew / candy / etc with them?", very low false
| positive rate in either direction.
|
| But regardless I have it on very good authority that with the
| BBB some within the Republican party wanted to limit EBT to
| only be able to purchase healthy food. No soda, no candy, no
| chips, etc. A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists
| shot that down.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that
| down.
|
| Fucking hell, if this is true, I don't know how those
| people sleep at night. Really, It's a failure if my
| imagination, but I don't imagine how people like this
| function. I'm sure I've done my share of indirect harm in
| this world, one way or the other, but being so on the nose
| about it would make me absolutely nauseous.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I agree, but: "individual freedom"
|
| It's a great umbrella.
|
| If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate
| their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
|
| It's gross, but it works for gross people, and there's a
| high enough percentage of gross people for this to make
| sense.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate
| their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
|
| In this case, I'm the American taxpayer who is paying for
| all of this food, and, perhaps more importantly, paying
| for all of the medical treatment they receive because of
| the consequences of these choices.
|
| When your consumption is being paid for by other people,
| it's perfectly reasonable for those people to put limits
| on your choices, especially when they're footing the bill
| for the consequences of any bad choices you make too.
| We're a wealthy country and shouldn't let people starve,
| but you don't need ice cream or Coke or Pringles not to
| starve.
| NickC25 wrote:
| It is indeed true.
|
| The truth is that lobbyists have a ton of cards to play,
| including that if such a ban were to go through, there
| would be a lot less demand for High Fructose Corn Syrup,
| which might sound wonderful, except that HFCS is a
| byproduct of corn, which is a major export of some very
| competitive swing states.
|
| You fuck with that, your party gets trounced in the next
| election.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Half of the purpose of SNAP is to be yet more subsidy to
| American megafarms. That was literally how it was done by
| FDR, and why it is administered by the department of
| Agriculture. It intentionally drives food production that
| wouldn't necessarily be profitable on its own because
| most first world countries, including the US, found that
| letting Capitalism run free on your food supply would
| result in booms, busts, and cyclic famine.
|
| Soaking up grain and corn syrup supplies is intentional.
| Ethanol in our gas has a similar purpose.
|
| However, the primary reason you should not care about
| SNAP recipients spending money on soda or chips or junk
| is because it's usually a good price/calorie ratio, so
| for the half a percent of Americans that literally don't
| get enough to eat, it can be sustaining, if not healthy,
| but for the rest, the idea that people shouldn't be able
| to have a small luxury because it's socialized is just
| too much.
|
| Taking candy from children is probably just not worth the
| squeeze. The entire federal SNAP program is ~$80 billion.
|
| Lookup WIC. It is a very restricted program of food
| assistance, and spends immense effort and money of "only
| healthy" or "no junk" and parental education and
| supporting nutrition, and it really pays off, but it does
| that by relying on ENORMOUS free labor from parents and
| stores. A WIC checkout takes significantly longer than
| average, is more error prone, and is miserable for all
| involved, for like $30 of bread and cheese.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Very informative post, and for background, I am not an us
| citizen. I have no issue with the idea of small luxury
| because it's socialized, but I do have the impression
| that obesity is a huge issue in the US and these kind of
| consumption patterns cause reinforcement and lead to
| worse outcomes. I have nothing against cheap food and
| cheap calories(actually I think they are super useful)
| but I do think healthier people are an aim we, as a
| species, should target.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I'll bite. I think there is a difference between "should
| they" and "should they be _able_ to. "
|
| Most liberals I know think they shouldn't but that its
| stupid to _police_ this aspect of people 's behavior if
| they are on EBT. Most liberals might even feel more
| comfortable regulating _everyone 's_ behavior by taxing
| unhealthy foods than they would just bothering poor people
| with it.
| cr125rider wrote:
| Taxes like that seem all but required if you want to have
| a chance at a functioning single payer system. 0 chance
| single-payer will works with so much freedom to destroy
| yourself then make everyone pay for it.
| phantom784 wrote:
| I don't see why this would be the case - it's not like
| the private system in the US today has different premiums
| based on how much junk food you eat (the closest to that
| I've seen is higher premiums for tobacco users).
| throwway120385 wrote:
| You have all of that freedom in countries with single-
| payer but somehow they're able to make it work.
| phantom784 wrote:
| EBT is already money with strings attached - you can only
| spend it on food. I don't see narrowing the definition of
| "food" here to exclude soda to be a huge problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Easily sidestepped, however, there is a thriving economy
| in poor neighborhoods around converting EBT to cash.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Soda, I agree.
|
| Chips ... I think you should probably allow parents to
| spend EBT to buy a bag of chips for a hungry/picky kid in
| a pinch.
| shuntress wrote:
| Why shouldn't EBT money be allowed to purchase sugar free
| soda?
| loire280 wrote:
| Since it has no calories, it's not "food" by even a very
| loose definition.
|
| As someone who lives in a neighborhood where most
| tapwater is still delivered by lead service lines, I'm
| sympathetic to the argument that it provides hydration.
| I'd prefer that my tax dollars went to solving that
| problem more directly, however.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| If we want healthy food we have to regulate the food-
| makers. Everything else is skirting the edges of the
| problem. Taxes, EBT restrictions, none of that will make
| a dent.
| zahlman wrote:
| I would say that a _short_ answer that _implicitly accepts
| the framing_ of the question is a flag for someone without
| well-considered political views.
| RavingGoat wrote:
| A poor kid on food stamps should be able to get a birthday
| cake on their birthday. Anyone that believes otherwise
| definitely should never have kids or work with kids.
| brainwad wrote:
| For exceptional items, can't the parent pay for them from
| non-SNAP money? For instance from the child tax credits
| they also get? SNAP's stated purpose is nutrition, not
| making birthdays fun.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Who cares? It's $5.00 to buy a box of cake mix and a can
| of frosting. Let poor people have fun sometimes instead
| of trying to use the welfare as a leash to harry them
| constantly about their choices.
| hairofadog wrote:
| In my experience the reason Republicans are so interested
| in what people can buy with food stamps is that they want
| very much to punish people who are on food stamps. If they
| truly cared about the health of needy Americans there are a
| lot of other things they could do, or even a lot of things
| they could _stop doing_ like making it more difficult to
| access health care, quackifying vaccine recommendations,
| holding press conferences in which they say nobody should
| take Tylenol under any circumstances, making dubious
| assertions about AIDS; the list goes on and on.
| acoustics wrote:
| People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on
| the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.
|
| The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent
| inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its
| limitations. We structure the program the way we do in
| order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor
| ever enjoying anything.
|
| Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological
| metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and
| psychologically, and this side of things is systemically
| underappreciated in policy circles.
|
| To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly
| should eat healthier. But are society's interests really
| better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed
| to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday,
| the way all of his friends do?
| dmschulman wrote:
| When Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches she was
| excoriated for trying to get healthier foods into the hands
| of children. Glenn Beck's response was "Get your damn hands
| off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat, fat, fatty and
| shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice!". Seems
| partisan spite cuts both ways.
|
| I'm glad to see this announcement and despite the leadership
| in Washington right now I don't think these adjustment will
| be seen as too controversial by the American public. The
| recommendations are based on a lot of good nutritional
| science that's been out there for years, but the buck seems
| to stop at the conversation around fat.
|
| They went to great lengths to remove the debate around good
| fat vs bad fat from this discussion. Even reading the report,
| emphasis is put on the discussion of why we use so many
| pressed oils in the food chain, but not why we phased lard
| and shortening out of the American diet.
|
| "Eat real butter" is ostensibly a recommendation presented at
| the bottom of the webpage, but butter is not a healthy fat.
| Same with some people's obsession with frying in beef tallow,
| but the report doesn't want to dig into this distinction for
| obvious self interested reasons. They even recommend:
|
| > When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils
| with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options
| can include butter or beef tallow.
|
| Which is a good recommendation. But no, you don't want to
| replace olive oil with butter or beef tallow. There's a lot
| of good nutrition science to back this up, but the report
| would prefer to not go there. Maybe "eat some butter" is
| appropriate, but unless the FDA wants to have an honest
| conversation around HDL and LDL cholesterol and saturated
| fats, I don't see this inverted pyramid doing too much good
| for overall population health (besides raising awareness)
| api wrote:
| I think this is at least better than the old food pyramid,
| though not perfect. It's a step in the right direction.
|
| What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a
| better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a
| resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official
| nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer
| with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol
| with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or
| maybe, or whatever that was.
|
| I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy"
| "natural" alt-med orbits have _usually_ had better ideas about
| nutrition. They 've historically been right about whole vs.
| processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs,
| sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been
| wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines,
| wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be,
| mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod
| to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.
|
| I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all
| populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may
| be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when
| it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go
| into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school,
| then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The
| people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to
| be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.
|
| Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what
| happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay
| with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist
| revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then
| they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals
| were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much
| profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they
| also knew how to extract petrol.
|
| Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated
| places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.
|
| I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably
| too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one
| of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an
| autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.
|
| The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature
| of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just
| read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it
| harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field
| where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge
| discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding
| those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.
|
| Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you
| can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the
| establishment are _usually_ not good. There have been
| historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through
| the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that
| turned out to be right.
|
| Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are
| wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward
| investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not,
| to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that
| is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because
| it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands
| to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were
| worthless or wrong don't make the news.
| koolba wrote:
| > What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get
| a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and
| a resurgence in easily preventable diseases.
|
| Clearly if you eat a T-bone steak and half a dozen eggs daily
| combined with 25 pull-ups, you don't need any vaccines.
| api wrote:
| You're getting downvoted for snark, but that's exactly what
| a lot of layperson MAHA people think.
| overgard wrote:
| I think you're worried too much about specific tribes and
| groups, and less about what information is good or bad. End
| of the day almost any source is going to tell you some things
| that are useful, some things that are useless, and some
| things that are actively harmful. I'm not trying to say all
| sources are equal, but mainstream medicine has a lot to
| answer for in terms of giving bad advice for decades (both
| now and historically). For a long time mainstream medicine
| also thought smoking was healthy and bloodletting was a way
| to treat infections. I don't say that to mean "don't see
| doctors" or "get your nutritional advice from chiropractors",
| I just think it's worth pointing out that with ANY source you
| need to wary. Autodidactism is a very good thing IF you use
| critical thinking when evaluating your sources.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| I think the point being made is that the challenge is when
| it comes to medicine, lay people can't even begin to
| understand the research and can't form their own opinion.
| So for those of us without MD's, we HAVE to trust someone
| to tell us what works and what doesn't. Giving mixed
| signals really screws that up as I can't personally assess
| what is good medicine and what isn't.
|
| Regarding, smoking and bloodletting, the former was bought
| and paid for by industry, that is just fraud. For the
| latter, there are cases where bloodletting actually works.
| Medieval medicine isn't the backward thinking we often
| ascribe to it and many would argue that it wasn't a "Dark"
| ages at all. There are even modern instances where maggots
| are the best solution for cleaning wounds. Even given that
| history, the recent advances by people whose jobs I can't
| even begin to understand, can nuke my entire immune system
| to treat a cancer and bring me back to full health. That is
| not something an autodidactic can do.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Just for anyone reading - the food pyramid was canned over 15
| years ago. MAHA promotes it as absurd in order to criticize
| it even though food guidelines have been evidence-based and
| extremely reasonable since the early Obama years. Their
| entire grift is built on deceit.
| overgard wrote:
| Yep. I switched to this sort of diet a few months back and
| there's been no downsides. I've gotten needed weight loss, more
| energy, better skin, and better mood.
|
| There was a temporary period where I had some GI issues from
| changing what I ate very abruptly, but that wore off as my gut
| bacteria adapted
| nemomarx wrote:
| If the current government gave me 500 dollars and told me the
| sky was blue I'd start checking to be sure it wasn't a scam,
| yeah? Even if they say something that sounds true you want to
| look for the trick.
| criddell wrote:
| I think the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the high-protein
| diet recommendations:
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu...
|
| There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find
| it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in.
| It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.
| overgard wrote:
| Honestly, you can find studies to prove just about anything
| when it comes to nutrition. Too much money involved.
| Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets
| to see how your body reacts. I find "high fiber" and "low
| protein" to be a suspicious suggestion though. Protein
| generally has a small insulin response, your body actually
| needs protein, and if things like the "protein leverage
| hypothesis" are correct it can also help with satiety. Fiber,
| on the other hand, is literally food stuff that can't be
| digested. It can be helpful for your colon bacteria, but
| that's about it.
|
| Just because an article comes from Harvard doesn't mean it's
| correct -- Harvard scientists were also behind the original
| food pyramid, and were likely paid off by the sugar industry.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Beyond the protein insulin response... when you have
| protein with sufficient fat, the insulin effect is much,
| much lower still. I tend to suggest that people try to get
| about 0.5g fat to 1g protein (which is slightly more
| calories from fat than protein). I think the aversion to
| fat is problematic and likely a lack of sufficient well
| rounded fat intake is likely a factor in the fertility and
| other hormonal issues in western society today.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Fiber also gives your colon material to push against, adds
| volume to poop, and helps clean and clear you out when you
| poop.
|
| If you're on a low-carb diet you should supplement fiber.
| criddell wrote:
| The recommendation wasn't for high fiber, low protein. It
| was moderate protein and higher fiber.
| overgard wrote:
| I still find it suspicious. "Moderate" protein sounds
| great, because "moderate" anything sounds great. The
| question is what "moderate" actually means. I think the
| people that encourage more protein are generally
| suggesting that the guidelines for "moderate" are
| actually too low.
|
| Tangent, but it reminds me of how people consider a
| "balanced" diet to be 1/3rd protein, 1/3rd fat, 1/3rd
| carbs. It sounds good, until you consider the purpose of
| carbs. Carb's aren't inherently bad of course, but they
| have glucose which stimulates an insulin response,
| resulting in storing more food as fat. And considering
| how many obese people we have, the "balanced" diet seems
| to be very unbalanced. The thing with carbs is, you
| really only need to take them in if you're very actively
| doing anaerobic exercise. If you're doing that, great!
| Then you should eat carbs. If you're sitting at a desk 8
| hours a day and not exercising at all, then you really
| don't need much in the way of carbs at all.
|
| Higher fiber seems, at best, to not move the needle much
| at all. At worst you could irritate various gut linings.
| Fiber in things like fruit can be good because it
| moderates the absorption of fructose, but I generally
| don't think you need to supplement fiber at all.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Fiber greatly lowers your blood sugar response because you
| can't digest it. It also lowers your blood cholesterol for
| the same reason, so it's often recommended for those with a
| risk of CVD to eat more fruits and vegetables. It also
| protects against colorectal cancer for similar reasons.
|
| Turns out just slowing down digestion can have a lot of
| benefits.
|
| Also, most Americans eat very, very little fiber. Anything
| is an improvement. I believe the FDA recommendation is 30
| grams a day, and most Americans eat, like, 2.
|
| However, most Americans are not deficient in protein. They
| eat lots of meat, and very little veggies.
| overgard wrote:
| Well, true on the blood sugar response, but you can also
| lower the blood sugar response by not eating high-
| glycemic-index foods in the first place. Or, you could
| eat resistant starches if you really want a starch. So I
| don't necessarily disagree with you, but unless you're
| living a very active lifestyle I think it'd be better to
| remove carbs than add fiber.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The thing is basically nobody eats enough fiber, so
| that's one big ticket optimization you can make. And the
| trouble with "eat less carbs" is that people take that
| and run with it, and cut out fruits and veggies, which is
| not going to help them.
|
| I agree people should eat less carbs in general, but we
| need to be careful. Ultimately, replacing kale or
| something with bacon, which is basically tobacco in meat
| form, isn't going to improve their health. Eat less
| carbs, eat more protein, but eat the right protein, and
| the right carbs.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different
| diets to see how your body reacts.
|
| I sometimes wonder if the complexity of the human body
| doesn't stop us from seeing things that can have great
| positive effect on a set of people because it's
| counteracted by the effect on another set of people so the
| result in the whole is cancelled out. I now wonder if the
| statistic methods used in these studies take this into
| account.
|
| All this to say that I approve of controlled self-
| experimentation, but you need to be very rigorous and
| brutally honest. Most people are not.
| deinonychus wrote:
| i think about this a lot and i genuinely believe that for
| every fringe diet or supplementation regimen, there
| exists a population it would genuinely benefit, for at
| least some point in their lives
|
| but it's tricky to figure out and i assume the consensus
| rules are good enough for most people
| jdietrich wrote:
| Unless you're doing something _blatantly_ wrong or have a
| very specific disorder like coeliac, diet just doesn 't
| have very much influence on health. There are a very wide
| range of diets that are more-or-less equally healthy,
| within a margin of error. Humans are highly adaptable
| omnivores that have evolved to survive and thrive on a
| broader range of foods than pretty much any other species.
| The data seems so mixed because the effect sizes of
| reasonable interventions are so small - a tiny signal
| drowned out by noise.
|
| The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-
| income countries are in fact doing something _blatantly_
| wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories
| than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what
| 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are
| deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that
| they 're eating far too much and do it anyway.
|
| The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly
| due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but
| in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before
| the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that
| poor people could _afford_ to become morbidly obese.
| Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all
| recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap
| food of all kinds.
|
| We've spent the last few decades trying to push back
| against that with all manner of initiatives intended to
| endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It
| doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when
| they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to
| follow it.
|
| If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on
| public health, I think there are only two credible options
| - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass
| prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other
| options are just permutations of "let's do more of the
| thing that hasn't worked".
| kace91 wrote:
| Fiber is stupidly easy to supplement, something that's not
| talked about enough.
|
| A glass of water with psylium husk a day and you solve _a
| lot_ of modern diet problems.its also super cheap,a $20 bag
| can last you a year.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Supplements don't seem to work as well as getting fibre
| from your diet.
| mitchell_h wrote:
| I agree. This is nearly the exact diet anyone with credibility
| has suggested for a long long time. If you get into the bro-
| science(which I believe tends to front run mainstream by a long
| ways), this is the diet every athlete and gym rat has been
| doing for years and years, with AMAZING results.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| The bro science would tell you the protein target is still
| too low too :)
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's starting to change... mostly in that exceeding
| 14g:1kg ratio mentioned in TFA is being shown to have worse
| results, so some more recent recommendations are that you
| need to get enough protein, but not too much.
|
| My own opinion is that you should also get at least 0.5g
| fat to 1g protein as a baseline... more would be for energy
| in lieu of carbs.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > you should also get at least 0.5g fat to 1g protein as
| a baseline
|
| And hormonal health
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| That sounds more like the fad Atkin's weight loss diet that
| said you could eat unlimited meat/fat/protein, but no carbs.
|
| This new JFK Jr diet has something in common with the Paleo
| "cave man" diet, which at least makes some sense in the
| argument ("this is what our bodies have evolved to eat") if not
| the specifics. I'm not sure where the emphasis on milk/cheese
| and eggs comes from since this all modern, not hunter-gatherer,
| and largely unhealthy, and putting red-meat at the top (more
| cholesterol, together with the eggs), and whole grain at the
| bottom makes zero sense - a recipe for heart attacks and colon
| cancer.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-nutrition-guidelines-...
| tracker1 wrote:
| Dietary cholesterol does not affect blood serum cholesterol
| and recommendations to limit cholesterol intake were removed
| from AHA and ADA guidelines in 2011 and 2013 respectively...
| the fact that this "common knowledge" still persists is
| disappointing.
| overgard wrote:
| Eggs are _very_ healthy. There 's a lot of nutrients that are
| hard to get from other sources that eggs have in abundance.
| And it makes sense in just a common-sense sort of way -- if
| you're a chicken you want to surround your offspring with the
| best possible food you can as they grow.
|
| With regards to dairy, it's more about a person's individual
| reaction to it. It's a similar argument with nutrient density
| (since milk is intended for growing offspring, obviously it's
| going to be very nutrient dense). The downside is potential
| inflammation or not having the enzymes to process it.
|
| I would definitely not lump eggs and dairy as "bad" in any
| way though.
|
| Also, the "cholesterol" thing is a very bad thing to focus
| on. Cholesterol is not bad! You need cholesterol. (What do
| you think cell membranes are partially composed of?
|
| Whole grains are not as good as you think. Often, they're
| made from strains that are optimized for growing and
| robustness not nutrition. Also, unless you're exercising a
| lot you really don't need much in the way of carbs.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There's certainly a difference between modern and ancient
| grain varieties, but OTOH whole grain bread is basically
| what fed at least the western world for the last 2000 years
| - bread was the center of the roman diet and also of the
| medieval diet, which seems more than long enough (~100
| generations - evolution is fast) for this to be the natural
| "our bodies evolved for this" diet that we should be
| targeting!
|
| As far as eggs and dairy go, sure they are healthy for who
| is meant to be consuming them - baby chickens and baby
| mammals, but that doesn't mean they are good for us in
| excess.
|
| There have been, and continue to be, so may flip flops in
| dietary recommendations and what is good/bad for you, that
| it seems common sense is a better approach. All things in
| moderation, and indeed look to what our relatively recent
| ancestors have been eating to get an idea of what our
| bodies are evolved to eat - whole foods and not processed
| ones and chemical additives.
| overgard wrote:
| Ancient grains are great! But frankly, you're probably
| not going to be finding Einkhorn grains in you're grocery
| store. It's not just the way whole grains are processed,
| it's also about the plants they grow from. Also, the way
| ancient grains are processed is not particularly
| profitable (they need to sit and ferment, for instance,
| and the grain itself is a lot lower yield).
|
| If you want to eat ancient grains I'd say go for it, but
| when I talk about whole grains I talk about what you're
| going to find in an average grocery store, and even what
| you find at a place like Whole Foods is pretty bad.
|
| I highly suspect that nobody other than body builders are
| eating eggs in excess (if that's even possible -- what
| bad nutrients are in eggs?). Eggs are kind of a pain in
| the ass to cook (other than hard boiling), and most
| processing is about convenience.. In any case, things
| like choline are hard to get from other sources, and I
| think it's not that wild to assume our ancestors loved to
| raid birds nests for nutrient dense eggs.
|
| Agreed on a lot of flip flops in dietary recommendations,
| but that definitely doesn't mean that the classic food
| pyramid was anywhere close to correct.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| If you're looking for an excellent supplier of einkhorn,
| I'd suggest Bluebird Grain Farms. (They're local to me,
| so I'm a bit biased of course. But they are a great
| group, and their flours and grains are excellent).
|
| https://bluebirdgrainfarms.com/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't think 2,000 years is enough, but am not an
| expert. The main thing that grains and bread did was make
| it a lot easier for more people to get through lean times
| without starving. It also allowed people to specialize:
| not everyone needed to be a hunter/gatherer.
|
| 20,000 years maybe yes. But we have not been agricultural
| for that long. And that's why grain-based food still is
| not something we're well adapted to.
| cpursley wrote:
| Humans have been eating eggs for approximately 6 million
| years, a few years more than bonbons...
| zahlman wrote:
| > Also, the "cholesterol" thing is a very bad thing to
| focus on. Cholesterol is not bad! You need cholesterol.
| (What do you think cell membranes are partially composed
| of?
|
| There is also not a very strong connection between dietary
| cholesterol and serum levels, anyway.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Common sense says that adults are not embryos and humans
| are not chickens, so if eggs are nutritious for adult
| humans, it's more of a happy coincidence.
| cpursley wrote:
| Our hunter gather ancestors ate eggs when they could find
| them, probably often uncooked. What they generally didn't
| come across were trees full of snickers bars, coke and
| Wonder Bread.
| caycep wrote:
| mostly because of the destruction of American science, public
| health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to
| publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a
| professionally trained RD to write it up.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| jdlshore wrote:
| The food pyramid was the result of intense lobbying and
| political processes, not scientists and doctors.
| salutis wrote:
| 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?"
| caycep wrote:
| also misleading. Nutrition science did not give the "food
| pyramid" quoted above, historically, it was Dept of
| Agriculture and associated lobbyists.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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?
| caycep wrote:
| No, that was the US Dept of Agriculture. You need to talk
| to an actual RD.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| "The professionals" produced 2.5-3 laughably bad food
| pyramids depending on how you count. Of all the things this
| administration has done to "run around" the system on this or
| that issue, this is not gonna be one I'm gonna get pissed off
| about.
| caycep wrote:
| Food pyramid is a US Dept of Agriculture thing, not from
| any professional RD
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Frankly I just don't trust federal health info while RFK jr. Is
| at the helm. 2 days ago they reduced the recommended scheduled
| vaccines from 19->11 with absolutely no evidence or process.
| All vibes and conspiracies.
|
| Why should I trust them with the food pyramid? How do I know if
| anyone who actually has expertise was consulted when his
| signature move has been axe experts and bring in "skeptics"
| with no actual background since day 1?
|
| I'm supposed to play ball and accept health advice from _the_
| antivaxxer who has led to countless unnecessary deaths? Who
| walked up with the president and said "Tylenol is linked to
| autism" with no evidence?
|
| No way.
|
| Edit: it's worth mentioning that he and a bunch of "MAHA"
| proponents cite the natural and healthy food in Europe but
| never want to use the dirty word that makes it happen:
| _regulation_. If we are serious about unhealthy additives and
| other food concerns, then we need robust regulations. They
| aren't serious about change. It's easy to go "we're gonna have
| everyone eat healthy and natural stuff" but when it counts they
| won't do what is necessary. [also toned down my heated
| language]
| VLM wrote:
| "hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and
| Flamin' Hot Cheetos"
|
| Its an addiction. Try taking away an alcoholic's alcohol and
| sit back and enjoy the infinite rationalizations about how its
| heart healthy and lowers stress and its just a couple a night,
| etc etc.
| wat10000 wrote:
| This department is led by an insane person who constantly says
| ridiculous things. It's not a "purely political reflex" to have
| an initial bad reaction to anything he puts out. The fact that
| this is fairly sensible is quite surprising. I'm sure it won't
| last, and we'll soon be back to saying Advil causes
| schizophrenia or whatever the next round of madness is.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| A lot of red meat is probably one angle I can't get behind.
| They are very high in cholesterol and triglycerides which are
| deadly for the heart over the long haul.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Is pretty clear that eating cholesterol doesn't lead to
| higher blood cholesterol. It just doesn't matter.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| From ://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-eat-as-
| little-dietary-cholesterol-as-possible/
|
| _" Most studies regarding cholesterol are bought and paid
| for by the egg industry. "_
| addisonl wrote:
| Its actually not "pretty clear"--about 25-30% of people are
| hyper responders who are impacted by dietary cholesterol.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new
| restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer
| eligible.
|
| I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy,
| and sugary drinks are _cheap_ and shelf-stable. They 're cheap
| because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more
| expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very
| limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new
| restrictions.
|
| The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and
| other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a
| hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the
| administration is to being "lobbied".
| shuntress wrote:
| The actual issue is that "Ultra-Processed" is EXTREMELY broad
| and vague.
|
| For example, hot dogs are ultra-processed. Obviously hot dogs
| are not the healthiest food but also obviously "franks and
| beans" is a pretty good meal for a tight budget and is
| something you should be able to get with SNAP.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new
| restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer
| eligible.
|
| Because poor people should be allowed to enjoy some of life's
| pleasures as well.
| shuntress wrote:
| > Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new
| restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer
| eligible
|
| The issue is that "Ultra-Processed" does not mean "candy and
| sugary drinks" and even "sugary drinks" is overly broad. Can
| SNAP pay for sugar-free Coke but not classic coke? What about
| Gatorade?
|
| SNAP already had reasonable restrictions. This very much feels
| like a "middle management style" project. Dedicating resources
| to a nebulously defined BIG project regardless of whether or
| not it actually improves outcomes.
| voxl wrote:
| The mythical "doctors" recommending high protein.. Yeah okay
| bud.
| shrubby wrote:
| Protein intale seems crazy.
|
| 0,9 grams per kg of LEAN weight is more than enough for normal
| activity.
|
| You don't need to feed the fat any protein as it will only
| accumulate more fat.
|
| And food produces a third of the emissions of humankind out of
| which full vegan would obliterate two thirds as in total of 25%
| of our emissions. Add the land use rewilding effect of 50-100
| gigaton and we'd be net neutral with this one change.
|
| Considering the iconic burning Macdonalds video and this
| recommendation we seem to be doomed.
|
| I'm lovin it.
| drakythe wrote:
| Disregarding comments on the proposed diet (as I am not qualified
| to comment and it all feels relatively like what I have passively
| absorbed over the past decade anyway):
|
| Why, WHY, does this page act like an Apple marketing page and
| require so much scrolling??? Thanks. I hate it.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, I hate the progressive scrolling crap myself too.
| FumblingBear wrote:
| Moderately amused at the quote "We are ending the war on
| protein." In my experience, every single brand in recent years
| has been coalescing around the idea of making protein bars,
| drinks, prominently labeling the amount of grams of protein are
| in items, etc.
|
| I'm not opposed, as protein seems to be a good target to
| prioritize, but claiming there's a war on protein just seems so
| out of touch to the point of absurdity. It's practically the only
| thing that people care about right now.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| > protein bars, drinks, prominently labeling the amount of
| grams of protein
|
| Most of which are loaded with crazy amounts of sugar to make
| them taste good.
|
| Have you ever looked at the label on a cup of non-plain "Greek"
| yogurt? (Which is 90% of the yogurt aisle.)
| tracker1 wrote:
| Not to mention, that refined proteins don't have well
| balanced amino acid profiles and the lack of well balanced
| essential fatty acids to go with them is also a serious issue
| IMO.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Your comment applies almost exclusively to plant-based
| protein (as opposed to milk, egg or other animal protein)
| tracker1 wrote:
| Milk, egg and other animal proteins are mostly consumed
| whole, and not refined, which does tend to reduce the
| completeness.
|
| ex: Whey protein isolate is less complete than actual
| milk... though milk has sugars and enzymes that you may
| not want to consume.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Yeah I misread your comment. I was thinking just about
| amino acid profile not fats
| loeg wrote:
| They're mostly loaded with non-nutritive sweeteners, not
| sugar.
| loeg wrote:
| The establishment guidelines on protein intake for decades
| (since the 80s) have been very minimalist, only looking to
| balance nitrogen -- leading to guidelines in the 0.8g/kg range.
| This is what they're referring to. Yes, it's still hyperbolic.
| But they're not talking about a relatively recent
| popularity/marketing swing. The new guidance of 1.2-1.6g/kg is
| 50-100% higher.
| drcongo wrote:
| UK supermarkets these days have a high protein version of just
| about every single product on the shelves. It's bizarre, and
| I'm guessing something to do with more protein being the advice
| when you're on GLP-1 drugs. The one that makes me laugh the
| most is "high protein" peanut butter.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Definitely related to GLP-1 drugs. I've seen people on the
| Mounjaro sub Reddit advising 1g per POUND of weight. Wtaf
| pengaru wrote:
| The irony is everyone already seems obsessed with protein these
| days, which I guess plays nicely with meat lovers / producers.
| The last thing Americans need is more encouragement on the
| protein front IMO. Suddenly everyone thinks they're a body
| builder when it comes to food.
|
| The few friends I've known were attempting ketogenic diets over
| the years kept focusing on the protein side when the actual
| diet is supposed to be dominated by fat. They've all
| experienced kidney problems of one sort or another, surprise
| surprise!
| SirMaster wrote:
| I mean protein does fill you up faster and better with fewer
| calories which is good for weight loss or management.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Not than fat. Fat fills you up fastest, per calorie.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Hmm, how do you figure? Just about every source I can
| find shows slow burning carbs, fiber, and protein rich
| foods blow fatty foods out of water in terms of satiety.
| (if you are using a metric other than satiety to
| represent "fills you up", feel free to correct me)
| pengaru wrote:
| > I mean protein does fill you up faster and better with
| fewer calories which is good for weight loss or management.
|
| Thank you for exemplifying the problem so clearly -
| conflating protein with fat when we're really talking about
| a simple carbohydrates issue of high energy density with
| negative satiety.
|
| Excess protein is excreted renally, it's easy to overdo and
| can cause serious problems.
| overgard wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_leverage_hypothesis
|
| Protein is actually pretty hard to overdo naturally. If
| you've ever tried to follow the high protein guidelines
| and you're a taller or broader shouldered person you'll
| find that getting that amount of protein requires
| supplementation or a lot of focus on lean meats. I'm not
| saying everyone needs to go "high" protein, I'm just
| saying that worrying about the amount of protein you're
| eating is probably not worth doing. You'll feel pretty
| full if you eat a lot of protein.
|
| Keto is not just "high fat" though. Keto is about
| producing ketones, and going too high fat can actually be
| counterproductive there, at least for weight loss. (You
| want to be liberating fat from your storage, not getting
| it from external sources)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A hypothesis with zero supporting data and primarily
| argued in a couple pop culture books is not something you
| should give any weight.
|
| Scientists do not write books when they have actual,
| meaningful findings.
|
| You've made this claim all over this comment section, so
| it's pretty frustrating to find it comes from a pretty
| awful source.
|
| I promise you, it is trivial to overeat protein.
| Americans love their 16oz steaks, and yet one pound of
| steak in a single meal is almost certainly "Too much" for
| a non-athelete diet.
|
| Meanwhile, simply look to every eating competition which
| uses a meat. There does not seem to be any natural
| limitation to overconsuming meat.
| midldei wrote:
| > protein does fill you up faster
|
| You are being pretty fast and loose with your language here
| so I will alight what I _think_ you are trying to say.
|
| "Fill you up" I must assume means that you are implying the
| state of feeling "full" or satiated.
|
| There is really only one study in the field of broad food
| source satiety: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/
|
| Potatoes are the most satiating food at 323% that of white
| bread.
|
| The second is Ling fish which is a source of protein, but
| another one of my assumptions is that when you say
| 'protein' I am doubtful you mean 'ling fish'. So assuming
| you mean a 2026 American definition of 'protein' you're
| probably referring to cow flesh (beef) which is only 176%
| of white bread, almost half of potatoes.
|
| So, in the future I would suggest spreading the word and
| correcting your comment by saying "I mean potatoes do fill
| you up faster"
| bccdee wrote:
| Yeah, (1) there is no "war on protein," (2) you do not need to
| eat very much protein unless you are trying to build muscle and
| you already work out a lot.
|
| The normal recommended daily intake for protein is 0.8 g/kg.
| 1.2-1.6 is silly; that's a recommendation for athletes.1
|
| Starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every
| society forever. _Sugars_ have not. It 's silly that they treat
| grains as a "sometimes" food.
|
| There's also the weird boogeyman of "processed food." Almost
| all food is processed to some degree & always has been. We've
| been cooking, baking, juicing, fermenting, chopping, grinding,
| mashing, etc. long enough that it influenced the shape of our
| teeth. Certainly we haven't been making Pizza Pockets that
| long, but the issue there isn't processing, it's ingredients.
| And the reason people buy Pizza Pockets isn't that they think
| they're healthy--it's that Pizza Pockets only need to be
| microwaved, and cooking a real meal takes time that a lot of
| people just don't have.
|
| [1]: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| 'Processed' generally means 'chemically modified', a la
| hydrogenated vegetable oil.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Generally the definition for ultra-processed foods includes
| a _lot_ more than that. Some definitions even include
| "wrapping in plastic".
| overgard wrote:
| Starches are basically glucose. They have a massive insulin
| response -- often even worse than sugar (because you eat
| starches in a much higher volume since they don't usually
| taste sweet).
|
| It's very hard to overeat protein naturally. It's very easy
| to overeat starches and other carbohydrates naturally.
|
| With regard to "processed" food, it's not a great label. I
| would use this metric: could you conceivably produce this in
| an average kitchen with the raw materials? If you can, it's
| probably safe, if you can't, it's probably something you
| shouldn't eat. For instance, processing often means
| "partially hydrogenating" a fat, or milling grains into a
| fine dust and bleaching them. Sometimes chemically produced
| oils are deodorized, because they would otherwise smell very
| unpalatable. You generally should not want your food to be
| bleached or deodorized..
| anon291 wrote:
| The market has clearly moved on, as you've identified,
| primarily due to bro science. Meanwhile, the medical
| establishment still thinks protein is going to kill you.
| croisillon wrote:
| the current protein hype was litterally in the news today
| https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/restaurant-menu-high-protei...
| fuddle wrote:
| They always need to make up a war on something. Its pretty
| standard template in American discourse e.g war on Christmas
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > Protein target: 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per
| day.
|
| I was amused to see (kilo)grams used for the weights. I'll admit
| that as an American, I have no idea what my weight is in
| kilograms. Body weight is something that I always think of in
| pounds. I do use grams sometimes in food prep, but I think even
| that makes me a bit of an abnormality around here.
|
| Not that I am complaining about their unit choice. I think
| American's would do well to be a bit more "bilingual" in our
| measurement systems. Also, the measurements they give are a lot
| easier to parse than 3/128 oz per 1lb bodyweight.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Nutrition labels are already in grams. I agree g/lb would be
| more readable, somebody probably raised their hand though and
| said "we're mixing system"
| tracker1 wrote:
| There are 2.2lb in 1jg... practically, just cut the amount in
| half (0.6-0.8g per lb of lean body weight). I say lean body
| weight as if you are overweight the target isn't the same.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it's really slow, but youtube & internet has me hopeful
| that metric units are coming through slowly, for example for
| cooking.
| neversettles wrote:
| I also feel there's a role that cooking equipment plays in weight
| loss. I've found that having newer, higher quality non stick pans
| helps me recognize I don't need to oil my pans with as much
| butter.
| tayo42 wrote:
| More bro science, doesn't this have issues with plastics?
| tracker1 wrote:
| s/1.2 to 1.4g of protein per kg of body weight/... lean body
| weight/
|
| If you're overweight, your protein target should be based on your
| lean mass, not your excess mass. While you can have more, you're
| likely better off conserving the calories.
|
| Also, personally, I tend to recommend at least 0.5g fat to 1g
| protein. This seems to be pretty close to what you get from a lot
| of healthy protein sources and given that you actually need a
| certain amount of essential fatty acids for your body to
| function, I find this helps from digestion, glucose control,
| satiety and even weight loss.
| qgin wrote:
| Is there any evidence that what people actually eat is influenced
| by government guidelines? I have a hard time imagining someone
| seeing this and making an actual changing to their life in any
| way.
| bradfa wrote:
| It may affect school lunch menus as much of the funding for
| school lunch programs is guided by the USDA. So, yes, lots of
| kids' diets may be affected by this during the school year.
| jordanpg wrote:
| FTFY: Eat Real Food -- if you can afford it and have time to.
|
| But I'm sure the Administration will accompany this release with
| various programs to boost access for the bottom 50% to fresh
| produce, meat, etc. right?
| dooglius wrote:
| The actual PDF here: https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf once you
| wade through the atrocious scroll-jacking
| ks2048 wrote:
| Is an upside-down Pyramid still a Pyramid?
|
| I thought the analogy was supposed to be a stable (wide) base
| forms the foundation of your diet.
| nihakue wrote:
| How is it possible that beef, dairy, and chicken are front and
| center while Lentils, Tofu (or even just soy), Chickpeas,
| Nutritional Yeast, Broccoli, etc are all left off? Why do they
| arbitrarily split "protein" and "fruit/veg" given that most/all
| of the most protein dense foods are vegetables/legumes? Steak is
| a terrible source of protein (in terms of nutrient density).
| Immediately pretty suspicious.
| samiv wrote:
| Steak is actually an excellent source of protein (and fat, if
| you get the fattier steak as you should).
|
| Just because vegetables, lentils or nuts contain protein it
| doesn't mean it's the same/equivalent to the protein in an
| animal product.
|
| Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has no
| downsides to it. All vegetables on the other side contain
| plenty of anti-nutrients such as folate and oxalates.
|
| Everything in human body, skin, connective tissues, tendons,
| hair, nails, muscles is essentially built out of protein and
| collagen. Fats are essential for hormone function.
| nihakue wrote:
| It's a good point, and maybe Broccoli isn't then as
| compelling as something like tofu, which contains nearly as
| much (and nearly as bio available) protein/calorie as lean
| steak.
|
| I guess I'd challenge the 'no downsides' claim. Few people
| stick to super lean grass-fed cuts, and the picture on the
| site is even a ribeye steak :P
|
| The protein density (g/kcal) of a ribeye steak is basically
| the same as tofu (I think like 14g/100kcal vs 11g/100kcal in
| tofu)
|
| I know I'm moving the goal posts slightly (I admit I didn't
| know about bio availability, and see now that I have more to
| read up on e.g. Broccoli), but am learning as I discuss
| rather than arguing a fixed point.
| treis wrote:
| The bigger problem is nutritional density. I tried meeting
| the 1-1.5 g/kg protein level through a vegetarian whole
| grains diet and it's a lot of flipping food. Equivalent of
| like 3kg of chickpeas a day to make it.
|
| It was definitely eye opening on the sort of ancient
| benefit of meat. It's really hard to reach your muscular
| potential without it.
| rafram wrote:
| An adult who weighs 75 kg, so is targeting about 75 grams
| of protein intake per day, would only need to eat 833
| grams of cooked chickpeas (which are 9% protein by
| weight) to get there. That is indeed a lot of chickpeas!
| But a lot less than you claimed, and you probably
| shouldn't be getting all your protein from chickpeas
| anyway.
| treis wrote:
| You're probably talking about dry weight. My can says 6g
| protein / 130 g. I'm about 100kg and to hit the 1.6 g
| protein/kg I need 160g of protein. 6g/130g * 3500 g is
| 161 g of protein.
| rafram wrote:
| Two numbers from the USDA:
|
| - Canned, drained and rinsed: 7g protein / 100g [1]
|
| - Boiled: 9g protein / 100g [2]
|
| Not sure what explains the discrepancy (though the second
| number is much older), but both are considerably higher
| than what your can says. Sure you aren't reading a per-
| serving amount?
|
| [1]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-
| details/2644288/nutrients
|
| [2]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-
| details/173757/nutrients
| treis wrote:
| Nope, here's the can:
|
| https://www.kroger.com/p/kroger-garbanzo-
| beans/0001111010648
| rafram wrote:
| Net weight (3.5 * 130g = 455g) includes the liquid, which
| you'd normally drain before cooking. The beans themselves
| are much more nutrient-dense.
| jandrese wrote:
| > Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has
| no downsides to it.
|
| The sound you are hearing is vegan heads exploding.
| p_j_w wrote:
| And anyone who knows even basic facts about nutrition.
| advisedwang wrote:
| > Meat is ... has no downsides
|
| Red meat has been linked to cardiovascular disease https://ac
| ademic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/44/28/2626/718873... https:/
| /www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2021.1... etc
| rafram wrote:
| > Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has
| no downsides to it.
|
| In moderate amounts, sure. But frequently eating red meat
| (more than two or three servings a week) is terrible for you.
| There's "a clear link between high intake of red and
| processed meats and a higher risk for heart disease, cancer,
| diabetes, and premature death":
| https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-
| bee...
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| There's a giant head of broccoli at the very top of the new
| pyramid? They emphasize protein AND fresh produce.
| nihakue wrote:
| I guess what I'm lamenting is the missed opportunity to
| highlight that many vegetables e.g. broccoli are an excellent
| protein source as well as other important nutrients. It gives
| you additional flexibility when meal planning. There's a
| common misconception (at least in my circles) that protein =>
| animal protein which isn't always useful for planning a
| balanced meal.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Most protein rich vegetables are legumes and beyond this
| are also rich in complex carbs. Legumes are in the top 10
| food allergies. Not to mention the amino profile of
| vegetable sources isn't very good.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Broccoli has 2.8g of protein per 100g. Beef has 26g per
| 100g, and chicken has 27g. If you're trying to get protein,
| broccoli isn't going to do much, and I think it's good that
| the government is being honest about that. A chart that
| listed broccoli as a major source of protein would be
| misleading. Broccoli is a good source of many nutrients,
| and the chart calls it out as such, but it is not an
| effective source of protein.
| scaredginger wrote:
| Normalising by mass is a poor way to assess food's
| protein content since different foods have greatly
| different water contents. E.g. beef jerky has much higher
| protein per 100g than beef largely because it's dried
| (admittedly, probably also because they use leaner cuts)
| djusk wrote:
| If you compare protein per kJ instead, broccoli has
| 0.021g protein per kJ whereas lean beef mince has 0.028g
| per kJ. Much more similar. Although of course you would
| need food that is higher density protein as well so you
| don't have too much volume to eat.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It's harder to get the target 1-1.6g protein per kg from
| vegetables, unless you're consuming beans/pulses which are
| also high in carbohydrates. Broccoli is not a great protein
| source, an entire head will give you 10g at most - the
| average adult would have to eat a dozen+ per day.
| layer8 wrote:
| I like broccoli, but you'd have to eat around six pounds of
| broccoli to cover the recommended daily intake of essential
| amino acids.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You have to consume a very large amount of lentils to make
| up a healthy amount of protein per day. It's something like
| 6 cans of chickpeas vs two chicken breasts per day. I
| believe you also don't get a complete amino acids panel
| like you would with meat which is complete on its own.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > I guess what I'm lamenting is the missed opportunity to
| highlight that many vegetables e.g. broccoli are an
| excellent protein source as well as other important
| nutrients
|
| I can see why you would expect something like that from
| this administration, but surprisingly the linked webpage
| seems to be based in fact.
|
| Broccoli are not an excellent protein source from a dietary
| perspective.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| those are terrible sources of protein.
| tracker1 wrote:
| No vegetable is as protein dense as actual meat in its natural
| form.
|
| Ruminant meat is absolutely one of the best bioavailable forms
| of a mostly complete amino acid profile, though eggs and dairy
| is more complete with differing ratios depending on form/feed.
|
| As to lentils, tofu, chickpeas etc. They're fine for most
| people in moderation, but they are also relatively inflammatory
| and plenty of people have digestive issues and allergies to
| legumes (I do), soy is one of the top 10 allergens that people
| face. While almost nobody is allergic to ruminant meat.
| dachris wrote:
| As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat,
| considering the adverse effects listed on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat
| eweise wrote:
| AI says legumes are anti-inflammatory.
| deinonychus wrote:
| my AI says they aren't
| eweise wrote:
| Try Google
| reissbaker wrote:
| Beef has ~3x more protein per gram than legumes. It is much
| more protein-dense than vegetables or legumes.
|
| Similarly, it's a "complete" protein, whereas most vegetables
| and legumes are missing necessary amino acids.
|
| The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the
| downside is high saturated fat. Chicken breast, though, is
| similarly high in protein without the saturated fat downside.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Worth noting that like amino acids there are essential fatty
| acids as well, and most people have poor nutrition there...
| red meat isn't "only" saturated fat, but a fairly balanced
| fatty acid profile. You can have too much, but in moderate
| cuts it isn't too bad.
|
| I usually suggest around 0.5g fat to 1g protein as a minimal,
| higher if keto/carnivore.
| reissbaker wrote:
| That's true, although fish has a better balance of
| essential fatty acids than red meat. Although, oddly
| enough, wagyu has a (much) better fatty acids profile than
| other types of beef, so you can justify the occasional
| wallet splurge on health grounds!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the
| downside is high saturated fat.
|
| There are other downsides to beef .. such as the batshit
| crazy use of ecosystems and resources required to produce it
| at industrial scale.
|
| Got a (beef) cow roaming in your yard, somehow getting by on
| whatever grows out of the ground? Enjoy your steak!
| Generating 6x the calories via a water-intensive cover crop
| to feed the cow so you can eat it later? Just say no.
| reissbaker wrote:
| This is orthogonal to nutritious eating habits; I don't
| think the food pyramid should lie about nutrition due to
| ecological concerns. (I _do_ think the food pyramid should
| be a little more concerned about saturated fat than it is,
| though -- which is why I called out chicken as an
| alternative, and elsewhere also mentioned fish.)
| samiv wrote:
| The fat is an excellent source of energy though and it's very
| hard to get fat by eating fat because it's essentially
| hormonally inert. I.e. eating fat doesn't precipitate insulin
| which is the hormone that enables body fat accumulation.
|
| So the problem with steak isn't the steak itself it's the
| "steak dinner" where the meat comes with sides such as french
| fries and drinks such as beer.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| As a flexitarian, I've had to think quite a lot about how to
| get enough bioavailable protein while moderating my carb
| consumption and digestive upset due to beans, and to do so in a
| sustainable manner factoring in convenience and lack of
| leisure. I certainly won't recommend anything but lean meat and
| dairy as protein staples to people who aren't used to watching
| what they eat.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I also didn't do very well with most beans, but for some
| reason chickpeas don't bother me, if you haven't tried them.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _How is it possible that beef, dairy, and chicken are front
| and center while Lentils, Tofu (or even just soy), Chickpeas,
| Nutritional Yeast, Broccoli, etc are all left off?_
|
| To quote famed businessman and philosopher Eugene Krabs:
| "Money."
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Big Broccoli need to step up.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I agree, but sadly it stands no chance against the lobbying
| powers of industrial pork producers, cattle ranchers or
| poultry giants like Tyson.
| danesparza wrote:
| You know what I don't see here is 'rocks' ... and yet ICE
| (another US federal agency) is apparently including that as part
| of the food they are serving:
| https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/california-congressman-has...
|
| Perhaps they should get on the same page as 'realfood'.
| literallyroy wrote:
| Any recommendations for healthy family eating that doesn't
| require an hour every day?
| bradfa wrote:
| Cook very large or numerous portions. Use what you need for 1
| meal, freeze the rest to save for future meals. Based on how
| much your family eats in that first meal, divide up the
| remaining amount into that sized portions when freezing. Warm
| up the frozen food in the oven (still may take an hour, but you
| can do other things during that time).
|
| Frozen vegetables are pretty cheap and easy to warm up quickly
| in the microwave or an air fryer. They may not be as good for
| you as fresh produce, but that can be a reasonable tradeoff
| based on the season and free time.
|
| Chest freezers are reasonably cheap to buy (new or used) and
| cheap to operate, assuming you have the physical space and an
| open electrical outlet. They don't consume much electricity,
| mine uses about 75W for the compressor (when it's running,
| which is less than 50% of the time) and about 250W for the
| defrost heaters (which seem to turn on for about 15 minutes
| roughly once per day.
| legitster wrote:
| "We're ending the war on protein"
|
| Weird branding and culture war stuff aside, this is probably the
| least objectionable thing this health administration has done.
|
| That said, I don't know if this would actually move the needle
| much. The Japanese diet includes so much more processed foods and
| less protein and they still live longer, healthier lives. I think
| the ultimate factors are still portion sizes, environment,
| activity, and genetics.
| elicash wrote:
| The new pyramid appears to have LESS protein in it than the
| Michelle Obama 2011 version, MyPlate.
| geon wrote:
| > Every meal must prioritize high-quality, nutrient-dense protein
| from both animal and plant sources
|
| Are they saying Real Food(tm) is incompatible with vegetarianism?
| aero142 wrote:
| Yes. They probably are, but it's moderately hard to eat a
| healthy vegetarian diet if you look at what vegetarian athletes
| actually eat.
| knollimar wrote:
| This isn't a pyramid?
|
| Also I'm no health expert but this seems like a ton of protein.
| I'd like to see what a day of this diet looks like
| shellac wrote:
| > This isn't a pyramid?
|
| Thank you for saying this. It immediately drove me crazy.
| ks2048 wrote:
| "We are ending the war on protein"
|
| The anti-woke warriors are predictably injecting _more_ politics
| into every corner of government.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| I hear Greenland was a hive of ANTIPRO activity.
| aero142 wrote:
| I think we need a serious answer for why appointing an
| unscientific mid-wit to HHS resulted in improved government
| dietary recommendations. This is not rhetorical. I'm aware this
| isn't perfect, but we have been far to forgiving of previous
| leadership.
| didibus wrote:
| The only change from the previous dietary recommendations that
| I can see is that they recommend a bit of a smaller portion of
| veggies and a bit of a bigger portion of protein. Everything
| else seems exactly the same.
|
| I think it's mostly just that there's loud talking points now
| and they're marketing it heavily to make it feel like it's
| their idea when it's already been the official guidelines for a
| while.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Why does it have to be another pyramid? Why can't we just use a
| simple pie chart? With a pie chart, we could compare both calorie
| ratios and daily ratios much easier.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Pies are too processed.
| parrellel wrote:
| Let's see what the people who want to Make Mumps Great Again are
| recommending today?
|
| 64oz rare porterhouse breakfasts is it.
|
| Neat.
| chrsw wrote:
| Great. Now let's start replacing fast food places with places
| that still serve you quickly but serve healthy food. Complete
| meals of whole foods.
|
| One of the problems with the way we live and work is that it's so
| easy to go for the quick option. If you're working 60+ hours a
| week or trying to run a busy household, unhealthy food options
| are really attractive for you because they're so convenient.
| People generally know what good food is, it's just that they make
| the sacrifice because there's other things going on in their
| lives.
|
| I've said things like this before and people respond like "well,
| I run my own business and raise a family and volunteer at my
| church and so on and on... AND cook perfectly healthy meals 3
| times a day!" That's awesome for you, you're amazing, but let's
| get real.
| tracker1 wrote:
| There's a chain here in Phoenix called "Salad and Go" that's
| pretty awesome... I'd love to see a fast food place that
| specializes in breakfast items that include keto bread options
| and low carb bowls all day.
|
| I'll also get plain beef patties or grilled chicken breasts
| from misc fast food places in a pinch.
| diath wrote:
| Fish, lean beef, chicken, eggs, kefir, milk, cheese, rice,
| potatoes, EVOO, fruit and vegetables is all you need for peak
| athletic performance and optimal hormonal profile.
| cpursley wrote:
| Kefir is amazing! My breakfast is now a Kefir shake with a half
| a ripe banana (those two work together), handful of frozen
| quality strawberries or blueberries, scoop of no-sugar added
| peanut butter and a pinch of salt.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir
|
| If you're stateside, you can buy it at Publix and other
| groceries: https://www.publix.com/pd/lifeway-lifeway-original-
| plain-kef...
|
| What is EVOO btw?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Extra Virgin Olive Oil... a mono-unsaturated fatty acid blend
| that's one of the healthier minimally processed oils. Not
| great for medium to high heat cooking. Avocado oil has a
| similar nutritional profile and can tolerate a bit higher
| heat. If you are doing anything resembling frying or higher
| heat cooking you're likely better off with a more saturated
| fat option, tallow/lard.
| victor_y wrote:
| I think the effort is valuable, however hard for individuals to
| act upon to effectively improve their diet.
|
| A simple do / don't list serves this better:
|
| Do: - Do consume more legumes or beans, lentils and peas. - Do
| consume more fish (low lead options) - Do consume more vegetables
| and fruit
|
| Don't - Don't consume alcohol or other harmful drugs - Don't
| consume sweetened items (either added sugars or artificial
| sweeteners) - Avoid processed food (try to cook as much as
| possible)
|
| Feel like this is more helpful for 99% of people.
| dooglius wrote:
| I thought I recall from reading a previous 5-year one of these
| there being much more explicit information on ranges of micro-
| nutrients one should get (e.g. an explicit recommendation for how
| much Vitamin C to get). Is there an equivalent somewhere here?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| War on protein? I don't know of any war on protein, but I do live
| in a more liberal area than the rest of the country. Considering
| this is coming from a more conservative government, I wonder what
| war on protein is going on in conservative areas of the country.
| Why were conservatives having a war on protein?
| mythrwy wrote:
| Geeze that's bad! Can we just show the pyramid and some text?
| NickC25 wrote:
| I own and run a CPG beverage company.
|
| This is a good start. A start. The folks at the top, including
| RFK Jr. are still captured by big industry.
|
| We need to get off of corn syrup, artificial ingredients, and
| harmful preservatives.
|
| That said, food deserts still exist, and real whole food is
| expensive, especially in a time of dire economic stress. I
| thought that's what subsidies were for, but apparently they are
| for enriching Big Food / Big Ag executives, their lobbyists, and
| their bought-and-paid-for congresscritters.
|
| We also need to realize we've been duped for generations into
| liking things that are overly sweet. Sweet is fine, but we don't
| need to add stevia or sugar to _everything_. One of my biggest
| walls of resistance that I see regularly with my own products is
| that people have been conditioned to expect that everything in my
| vertical is super sweet. Just last week I had a parent complain
| at a sampling that my drink wasn 't as sweet as Prime, and thus
| it's shit. Prime has over an ounce of added sugar in its bottles.
| I'm marketing to an entirely different set of consumer, too. I
| offered her a million USD in cash if I could name 10 ingredients
| on a Prime bottle, and she'd tell me what the ingredient was for,
| why it helped her son, and the natural origin of the ingredient.
| She accepted, couldn't get past 1, and then told me that it
| didn't matter - her son liked what he liked and that's what she
| was going to buy. We've spoiled generations of people into
| accepting super sweet things with no idea of why something is or
| isn't sweet.
|
| One thing I also do is that (i have the luxury of time to do
| this, which I recognize is something not everyone has) if i want
| something really sweet and it's not a fruit, I generally make it
| myself. If I am having a birthday party, I'll make the cake
| myself. If my nephew wants to leave christmas cookies out for
| Santa, I'll make them myself. If I want ice cream, I have an ice
| cream machine and I'll make it myself.
| zahlman wrote:
| > That said, food deserts still exist, and real whole food is
| expensive, especially in a time of dire economic stress.
|
| I can still routinely get potatoes in season at 20c/lb, carrots
| in season at 40c/lb, bananas at 60c/lb, dried legumes at $1/lb
| or not much more, frozen ground meat in the ballpark of $3/lb,
| eggs for less than $4/dz (almost as much protein as a pound of
| fatty meat), boneless skinless chicken breast under $5/lb,
| butter and cheddar cheese at right about $5/lb, 2% milk at
| $1.25/L (skim milk powder is a bit more economical if you don't
| want the milk fat)...
|
| In less healthy options, white flour at 45c/lb, polished white
| rice less than $1/lb (sometimes as low as 70c), rolled oats at
| $1.50/lb (though I'm leery about the glyphosate), select dried
| fruits in the ballpark of $3/lb, bacon at $3.60/lb...
|
| all $CAD, by the way. I converted weights but not currency.
| Last time I looked at American food prices, you guys had way
| cheaper meat than us after currency conversion.
|
| > One thing I also do is that (i have the luxury of time to do
| this, which I recognize is something not everyone has) if i
| want something really sweet and it's not a fruit, I generally
| make it myself. If I am having a birthday party, I'll make the
| cake myself. If my nephew wants to leave christmas cookies out
| for Santa, I'll make them myself. If I want ice cream, I have
| an ice cream machine and I'll make it myself.
|
| ... Generic sandwich cookies and tea biscuits under $2/lb
| (though they used to be considerably cheaper)....
|
| I absolutely agree with you about the sweet cravings, though.
| TruffleLabs wrote:
| Kellanova, formerly known as the Kellogg Company, got the message
| and are now making Pop-Tarts with extra protein ;)
|
| https://www.poptarts.com/en_US/products/new/pop-tarts-protei...
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is the first food recommendation from the government that
| makes sense.
|
| 6-11 servings of grains, 3-5 veges, 2-4 fruit, 2-3 dairy, 2-3
| protein (all sources), minimal fat was absurd and bad. Protein is
| until you hit your needed macros. Fats are as needed. Processed
| grains are basically empty calories. a cup or two of whole grains
| is all you really need and thats it.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| They're lying to you that the last guidelines were the food
| pyramid people are remembering from the 1990s.
|
| These are the prior recommendations:
| https://lgpress.clemson.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/...
|
| 100% evidence based but not branded as contrarian by a bunch of
| Instagram idiots so people assume they didn't exist.
| opinion3k wrote:
| it's great to recommend these things but if you're poor and live
| in a food desert, it doesn't address the actual issues that
| prevent people from eating healthier: money, living in an area
| where the bodega or wal-mart are your only food options,
| corporate interests that want us to eat ultra-processed foods,
| not having the time or ability to cook, and many more I'm sure.
| aworks wrote:
| I was roaming around the rural Western US last year.
|
| If I saw that there was a Walmart in town, I perked up.
| Consistent, low-priced and large number of grocery items.
| Likely better than an unknown, variable, often poorly stocked
| local grocery (or worse, groceries at a gas station/convenience
| store).
|
| I also liked seeing the economic diversity of customers that I
| wouldn't see at home.
|
| In larger cities, I'll choose other groceries if I can for
| better selection, if not better prices.
|
| Of course, except for maybe Sprouts, all the places I shop
| emphasize ultra-processed corporte interests.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm not that far from a Walmart in a more upscale
| neighborhood, I used to use that one for my oil changes.
| Always interesting seeing a > $100k sports car in a Walmart
| parking lot (not referring to my car).
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even questionable quality ground beef is almost always a better
| option than most carb-centric nutrition sources. It freezes
| well, transports is broadly available and can usually be
| ordered for delivery.
|
| Eggs, aside from some of the disease issues are also a very
| good, nutritionally complete source of protein that are
| relatively inexpensive.
|
| Another issue is that people have been conditioned to eat/snack
| all the time... a lot of people have moved towards 2-3 meals a
| day which is closer to historical norms... have protein be your
| main source, with vegetables as a side, and maybe bread/pasta
| at some meals.
|
| There are also beans/legumes if you can tolerate them.
| ahoka wrote:
| This was literally a South Park episode.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| The pyramid being upside down with grain on the bottom and fats
| and oils being on top is directly from south park.
|
| The only difference is that meat, fat, dairy, fruits and
| vegetables are grouped together with this new pyramid with
| grains on the bottom. while south park puts fats -> meat and
| dairy -> fruits and vegetables -> grains as the order.
| Ciunkos wrote:
| Ref: https://www.southparkstudios.com/video-clips/qcl2i8/south-
| pa...
| ndom91 wrote:
| Well it's a next.js app that's not vulnerable to react2shell,
| that's at least something they've done right haha
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > For decades we've been misled by guidance that prioritized
| highly-processed food
|
| WTF are they talking about?
| Whatarethese wrote:
| Good information and pyramid but holy moly that website is awful
| on desktop with a mouse.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| What _was_ that animation? It looked like 3 stock images coming
| together briefly, then flying off again, then the page scrolling.
|
| Regardless, there's nothing here (aside from the odd scrolling
| layout of the page itself) I can disagree with. I'm already
| following this "diet" in the most part anyway, and that's without
| consciously thinking that much about it.
| sdwr wrote:
| It was a low-budget restating of the message:
|
| - examples of real food
|
| - "coming together", as in being focused on
|
| - zooming away, as in being spread and disseminated widely
|
| It contrasts with the slick, professional look of the rest of
| the page, showing heart and passion for the message.
| cathyreisenwitz wrote:
| Vegs should be at the top, meat & animal products under. Still an
| improvement. #1 health tip for poor autists w IBS: Half a bag of
| frozen vegs in a bowl + splash of water. Microwave 2 min. Stir.
| Microwave 1 min. Salt. Eat.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I would love to read something composed of actual text instead of
| flashy animations and movies.
| djoldman wrote:
| This page seems to be the most "design-forward" federal .gov
| website I've ever seen.
|
| Does anyone have other examples?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| That animation was laughably bad though you have to admit.
| croisillon wrote:
| disappointed they didn't do it in times new roman
| btreecat wrote:
| It's a reverse funnel system
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| What lunacy?
| binarymax wrote:
| Staunch anti-vaccine, and he's tearing apart the CDC wit
| regards to the same.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Vaccines being "dangerous" is one of them.
| cr125rider wrote:
| 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.
| alterom wrote:
| _> 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.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| 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?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The argument I've seen is that because the US has worse
| medical care in general, it makes sense to get more
| vaccinations.
| j0057 wrote:
| I haven't particularly kept up with RFKs brand of MAGA
| craziness, but all European countries have different
| childhood vaccination schedules, with some overlap, see
| here: https://vaccination-info.europa.eu/en/about-
| vaccines/when-va...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| They are based on denmark's guidelines, which as you know
| is a very cold country.
|
| 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.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine"
| schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it
| eliminates exemption from lawsuits. If you "choose" a
| non-routine vaccination, people can then sue pharma for
| ANY harm, and 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. RFK's fans (Del
| Bigtree) have admitted that this is their plan. And if
| they're NOT routine, they'll probably not be covered by
| insurance, so you'll have to pay hundreds or thousands to
| get one. I would still do that, but not many others will.
|
| Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually
| available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a
| choice.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| "Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine"
| schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it
| eliminates exemption from lawsuits"
|
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| Cerebral palsy, a naturally occuring disorder, generates
| $10M in "malpractice" payouts, part of why giving birth
| in USA is so expensive.
| tomcam wrote:
| Kennedy has never said anything like that
| nancyminusone wrote:
| It's true - none of his conspiracy theories involve the moon
| directly.
| adezxc wrote:
| Paracetamol causing autism lol
| jpadkins wrote:
| 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > and people should know that and be careful
|
| This implies a causal relationship.
| tejohnso wrote:
| It think it implies uncertainty.
| quentindanjou wrote:
| > He cited the studies
|
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol
| during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism,
| and people should know that and be careful.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not to support this particular but most doctors would
| advise "minimized or avoided" use of any medication
| during pregnancy, including OTC meds. Not that there
| aren't good reasons to sometimes use them, but you
| probably should not think it's OK to chug Nyquil every
| time you get a runny nose if you're pregnant.
|
| 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.
| adezxc wrote:
| I mean he literally said this, without any citation(!):
| "There's two studies that show children who are
| circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's
| highly likely because they are given Tylenol" [1]
|
| 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...
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Show us all how all the data on vaccines is "abominable".
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Don't you remember how everyone who got a covid vaccine
| died off two years later?
| hairofadog wrote:
| While he moderates his take on it depending on who his
| audience is, he has said "There's no vaccine that is safe
| and effective."
|
| https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-
| election-2024-preside...
| codeka wrote:
| > One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it
| doesn't help is the amish
|
| 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?
| tomcam wrote:
| Should we be forced to drink pasteurized milk?
| ericd wrote:
| I'm guessing you're not American, since we don't call it
| paracetamol, so maybe European? Hopefully not
| astroturfing...
|
| And if you are European, I'd be surprised that you're so
| pro-pasteurization on dairy, given that Europe is much
| looser than the US on requiring that (but tighter on
| controls upstream at the farm-level). I miss all those raw
| milk young cheeses.
|
| But 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. My mom, a pediatrician, never let it
| 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.
| jjcm wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Can you link to your strongest source for one of those
| claims?
| Carp wrote:
| https://www.factcheck.org/2025/10/rfk-jr-s-inaccurate-
| claims...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| 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...
| tomcam wrote:
| The Cato.org one is interesting because it only
| speculates what might have influenced him, then attempts
| to debunk those sources.
|
| Obviously I feel like he should be providing his sources.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| AI generated health report citing hallucinated research and
| incorrectly representing real research.
| jmuguy wrote:
| 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".
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| 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.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| 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
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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.
| deflator wrote:
| It was a low bar. The previous nutrition guidelines were
| garbage for generations
| great_wubwub wrote:
| 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.
| simianparrot wrote:
| How long did humanity survive without vaccines for
| _everything_? Oh that's right.
|
| 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.
| luddit3 wrote:
| 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.
| lfmhd wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And the anti-vax crowd was a minority fringe until
| recently (they still pretty much are but they have some
| new vocal proponents now). The politicization, lies, and
| misinformation about the COVID vaccine in particular
| really damaged decades of trust that had been built.
| nilamo wrote:
| 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?
| dap wrote:
| > 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > One's choice here affects everyone else
|
| 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.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| > Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol.
|
| 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.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Are you also living in a cave and hunting your food, since
| humanity survived on that for millennia?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| That all makes sense but I don't think it gives anyone
| the right to make health care decisions for me. Nor does
| it give anyone the right to invent senseless and cruel
| policies designed to harm people who refuse to accept the
| common advice for what are possibly their own good
| medical reasons.
|
| 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?
| knome wrote:
| >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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| 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
| themafia wrote:
| > 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.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > 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"
| orochimaaru wrote:
| My kids are all vaccinated according to schedule. Calling
| me an anti vaxxer is cheap trolling.
|
| 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.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| "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.
| great_wubwub wrote:
| 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.
| ASinclair wrote:
| 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.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| A stopped clock is right twice a day. These recommendations
| come from a corrupted source and therefore have no value.
| brianf0 wrote:
| This... is so silly.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| ...but you just made the argument that corrupted sources can
| be, on occasion, correct.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| diegocg wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| hairofadog wrote:
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| 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.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| RFK is a pretty fit, healthy guy. Whatever he believes is
| certainly working.
| uoaei wrote:
| Poe's law in action.
|
| This is the guy famous for having and being proud of his
| brain worm.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah but I've seen a documentary, Futurama I think it was
| called, that showed the cognitive benefits of having
| worms.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| A friend of mine is in great shape and smokes cigarettes
| stickfigure wrote:
| He spent 15 years as a heroin junkie. I sure hope that
| doesn't show up in the US RDA.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm pinning the blame for the frustrating animate-while-you-
| scroll design squarely on RFK.
| 827a wrote:
| I am positively blown away by the work National Design Studio is
| doing for the Federal Government.
| zachthewf wrote:
| I like the look and brand, but the animations/clickjacking are
| really jerky for me. Are you not having any issues with that?
| bookman10 wrote:
| This is so much better. I wish this had been the advice when I
| was young.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Not bad.
|
| I mean, the site runs like ass on my machine and gets the
| scrolling wrong a lot
|
| But the recommendations are actually pretty good, and I even
| think the wording and tone is right, and I think it could stick
| in the minds of modern generations.
|
| It does a good job of not pushing or engaging in any sort of BS
| conspiracy against seed oil or telling you to eat raw bull
| testicles or any bullshit.
|
| Though, to be frank, this is what the entire medical
| establishment has been saying without fail for over 30 years.
| This was known when we built the original Food Pyramid. We
| expanded the grains category in it because of grain grower
| lobbying, and it was known to be not that important, though a
| grain heavy diet would have been a beneficial recommendation a
| hundred years ago when America was less wealthy.
|
| The food pyramid shown here was replaced by the Bush Jr admin 20
| years ago. Then we had a short lived pyramid that made no
| suggestions on amounts, and encouraged physical activity, and
| that was replaced by MyPlate which hilariously puts "dairy" in a
| glass as if you should regularly drink milk and not otherwise
| consume dairy.
|
| My one qualm is that 100g per normal sized person of protein per
| day I think is a bit much, but Americans already do that for diet
| choice reasons. It really should be more plant food than meat.
|
| But the official medical guidance has been identical for my
| entire life at least: "Eat a varied and balanced diet, don't over
| snack, don't drink calories, eat lots of plant fiber, eat
| basically anything in light moderation, exercise"
|
| Oh sure, the tabloids at the checkout always have some diet fad.
| It was never supported by science or recommended by the actual
| field of medical science. Even during the 90s when we supposedly
| demonized fat, that was primarily diet culture.
|
| The reality is knowing "what is a healthy diet" hasn't been the
| limiting factor in several generations. People aren't fat because
| they think chips, soda, and chicken nuggets are healthy for
| heavens sake.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Good message, shitty website.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Past experience has me asking whether this was drafted with the
| help of the Real Food Lobby. (I jest, but not all the way.)
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Terrible website in both usability and conveying information but
| it looks nice. Info is good, Americans do need to eat healthier
| and these are good guidelines.
|
| Also was this AI generated because Americans dont know what a
| Kilogram is and wouldnt use it to measure bodyweight.
| cr125rider wrote:
| The war on protein feels as made up as the war on Christmas...
| rayiner wrote:
| The old food pyramid has been taught to school kids for decades--
| it was entrenched when I was a kid in the 1990s--and that has
| coincided with a huge increase in obesity in the country over the
| same period. Dispensing with it is a great step forward.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Did anyone buy that food pyramid? I assume people laid
| attention to it as much as they paid attention to "just say no"
| jerlam wrote:
| I don't think the old pyramid was around for decades. According
| to wikipedia, the "carbs on the bottom" food pyramid was only
| recommended from 1992 - 2005, or 13 years. Those dates just
| happen to coincide with the age group of 30-50 year old adults
| that are over-represented here.
|
| It was replaced with a rainbow-like pyramid in 2005 which
| completely negated the concept of a pyramid, and then a circle
| (plate) in 2011.
|
| We need to stop bringing up the food pyramid that everyone
| already agreed was bad and replaced 20 years ago.
| j_w wrote:
| This understates the vegetable and fruit intake you should have.
| 3 servings vegetables and 2 fruit is under what you should aim
| for. 2-4 servings of grains is a lot of grain.
|
| Ideally the bulk of the volume that you eat should be vegetables
| and fruits. Meat as nutritionally required/when you like it. Meat
| at every meal/every day is not needed. Grains are a good filler,
| but vegetables and fruits are king.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| I appreciate the nod to whole milk, which has been repeatedly
| shown to be associated with _lower_ obesity in children. E.g.
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31851302/, many other studies.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I appreciate the nod to whole milk because 'lite' milk is,
| well, Nick Offerman said it best as Ron from Parks and
| Recreation:
|
| "There's only one thing I hate more than lying: Skim milk.
| Which is water that's lying about being milk"
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Sounds like big government getting into people's lives to me.
|
| Snark aside, american food culture is geared towards people
| working hard manual jobs, rather than desk work. It was fine in
| the 70/80/90s when people were still doing that kind of job, but
| times have changed. If you're burning 2k calories at work, you
| need a high calorie, high salt meal to replenish what you
| burnt/sweat out.
|
| I would also gently point out that a "balanced" meal is generally
| better than a protein heavy meal. It also is highly dependent on
| your genetic makeup. I am much less sensitive to carbs compared
| to my Indian friend, My family also doesn't have a history of
| type 2/1 diabetes.
|
| I'm also not sure how this is going to be balanced with farm
| subsidies.
| kasane_teto wrote:
| I hate websites that scroll like this. It's so... clunky.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Of note: the US's per capita consumption of meat has increased by
| more than 100 pounds over the last century[1]. We now consume an
| immense amount of meat per person in this country. That increase
| is disproportionately in poultry, but we also consume more
| beef[2].
|
| A demand for the average American to eat _more_ meat would have
| to explain, as a baseline, why our _already_ positive trend in
| meat consumption isn 't yielding positive outcomes. There are
| potential explanations (you could argue increased processing
| offsets the purported benefits, for example), but those are left
| unstated by the website.
|
| [1]: https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-
| consum...
|
| [2]: https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-
| detai...
| jdlshore wrote:
| It says 1.2-1.6 grams of protein and healthy fats per kilogram
| of body weight, from animal and plant sources (including milk).
| Is that really advocating for more meat?
| omgJustTest wrote:
| 90g of protein, what is recommended for me, is like 4
| hamburgers or a 16oz steak per day ...
| tejohnso wrote:
| Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person would
| need to consume the same amount of protein as a 400lb lean
| muscle bodybuilder.
|
| All of the protein recommendations I've seen were for _lean
| mass_. You don 't feed fat.
| deinonychus wrote:
| > Doesn't make sense to me that a 400lb obese person
| would need to consume the same amount of protein as a
| 400lb lean muscle bodybuilder.
|
| yeah both of those people are extreme cases that would
| break this very crude formula
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Correct, and the guideline on the "realfood.gov" site
| doesn't say it but all the protein g/kg body weight I've
| seen (mostly relative to weight training or building
| muscle) are in terms of kg of lean body mass, not total
| body weight.
| deinonychus wrote:
| do you think that's a lot or a little? does that sound
| realistic or unrealistic?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Nobody should be getting all of their protein from meat,
| though.
|
| Even a cup of cooked rice or a slice of bread has several
| grams of protein.
| brainwad wrote:
| That's not really a lot of protein on a low carb diet like
| they are suggesting.
| blks wrote:
| If you don't forget to count proteins from all the grains
| and other products, then you may realise you don't need
| that much meat (or any meat at all).
| woodruffw wrote:
| The implication is that the current food pyramid
| disproportionately weights against proteins and fats.
| Assuming that Americans follow the current pyramid (this is a
| hell of an assumption), then any change to the pyramid that
| asks them to change their diets in favor of _more_ protein
| and fat is likely to result in them eating more meat.
|
| In reality, I don't think anybody in the US follows the food
| pyramid religiously. But I _do_ think people (try to) follow
| the main strokes of what the government tells them is a
| healthy dietary balance, and so any recommendation to
| increase their fat /protein intake _will_ result in more meat
| consumption even if the guidelines doesn 't itself proscribe
| that as the only source.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| The food pyramid was phased out in 2011:
| https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-
| pyramid-...
| Y_Y wrote:
| You can't phase out common "knowledge"!
| ericd wrote:
| As I see it, the point of this new pyramid is not to add
| more emphasis to meat specifically, but to undo some of the
| past vilification of fat (note the emphasis on whole milk
| and full fat dairy), and to move emphasis away from carbs
| as the basis of the diet. And honestly, I think that's
| pretty much correct - the low fat movement was a disaster
| for our collective health, because food manufacturers added
| more sugar to compensate for the bad effects on taste that
| that has, and because if you eat a good amount of full fat
| stuff, there's not nearly as much need to snack between
| meals.
|
| If you go to Western Europe, they're not drinking lots of
| skim milk, and if you eat things from the bakeries, there's
| more butter and not as much low quality vegetable oil or
| sugar. When my French cousins come here, they find lots of
| the stuff sold here revoltingly sweet.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Americans do not follow the food guidelines. It's an
| absurdly low percentage who do
| weslleyskah wrote:
| This can be an outrageous amount for a normal individual.
| These proportions are used for bodybuilders and powerlifters.
|
| And even then this rule is not perfect because of individual
| genetics, metabolism rates, activity level, percentage of
| lean mass, etc.
|
| Americans (US citizens) really do eat a lot. What the hell
| HoJojoMojo wrote:
| These numbers are actually "disappearance" they include an
| immense amount of food waste as well so the average
| American is probably almost half a body builder and leaving
| food on their plate at a restaurant while more of it is
| going bad at home and in their grocery.
| MattRix wrote:
| yeah, and it's also worth noting that the usual guidelines
| you hear like "eat 1g of protein for each pound you weigh"
| are actually meant to be 1g of protein per pound of _lean
| mass_ , which for many people is significantly smaller
| amount.
| dkarl wrote:
| The public health discourse about protein is in a weird place
| right now. The recommendations are higher than ever, yet
| people are constantly told not to think about protein, or to
| worry about excess protein intake instead.
|
| Case in point: the Mayo Clinic article titled "Are you
| getting enough protein?"[0]
|
| It claims that protein is only a concern for people who are
| undereating or on weight loss drugs, yet it cites protein
| recommendations that many people find challenging to meet
| (1.1g/kg for active people, more if you're over 40 or doing
| strength or endurance workouts.) To top it off, it's
| illustrated with a handful of nuts, which are pretty marginal
| sources of protein. It's bizarrely mixed messaging.
|
| [0] https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-
| health/speak...
| ctoa wrote:
| When I did strength sports and would eat ~180g protein a day
| (which for me was 1.8g/100kg), I ate a lot less meat than you
| would think, I was carefully tracking all my food for a while
| and you have to count the whole diet.
|
| I really like this study of a population of highly trained
| athletes and their diets/protein intake:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27710150/
|
| In that study they eat > 1.2g protein/kg body weight, but 43%
| of that is "plant sources", meaning grains, legumes, fruits
| and vegetables. Like one serving of oatmeal is 6g, things you
| don't think of as "protein" add up and you have to count
| them. The athletes in that study are Dutch and 19% of their
| protein intake came from bread.
|
| But what always happens with protein recommendations is that
| they say "x grams protein/kg bodyweight" but people hear
| "protein is meat, you are telling me to eat x grams/kg
| bodyweight of meat." Very few people ever look closely enough
| at their diet to develop an intuitive sense for counting
| macros.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Protein from grain food isn't as well absorbed as protein
| from meat, milk, fish. Roughly, 2g of protein from bean
| equal 1g meat protein.
| ctoa wrote:
| Yes, but the standards aren't based on "the best protein
| to absorb", they are based on whole diet consumption.
| Studies like the one I linked to are where the
| recommendations come from. It is a misunderstanding to
| read a recommendation for 1.2g/kg (or whatever) as saying
| that the 1.2g is supposed to all be meat quality protein.
| It's supposed to be the protein in your total mixed diet.
|
| Your diet contains many sources of protein lower quality
| than beans (as in the linked study with high level Dutch
| athletes getting 19% of their protein from bread), you do
| need to count those. They do add up and if you don't, you
| end up assuming you need way more protein than you do.
| parl_match wrote:
| I'm a weightlifter and as part of my training, I eat pretty
| close to about a pound of meat a day during bulk, usually about
| 12-14oz. This is because I need to eat about 200g of protein a
| day. I supplement it with protein shakes.
|
| I find that to be a _challenging_ amount of meat. It 's a lot!
| And to find out that's _average_???
|
| Americans eat way too much meat. Cheese, too.
| dfee wrote:
| I too try for 200g of protein/day, with meat and supplements
| by shakes. It's difficult to eat more meat than that, because
| of how it fills you up, its prep requirements and its cost.
|
| I don't believe that the average American eats nearly a pound
| of meat per day. I do believe if the average American ate
| meat before carbs, we could get there, and all be a lot
| healthier, though.
|
| For me, processed carbs make me much hungrier, but the kale
| salad I'm eating right now makes me less hungry.
| itsamario wrote:
| I cut out mammal products and replaced with plant protein
| like lentils and wild rice.
|
| I can eat 200g of lentil noodles in a sitting.
| parl_match wrote:
| lentils carb/protein ratio isn't great. you still need to
| supplement it with protein (whey or pea). i eat a fair
| amount of lentils, but mostly as a carb source (like
| white rice). even tofu's ratio isn't good enough. i do
| eat a lot of tofu though, because i like it
|
| back of the hand math suggests id have to eat a kg of dry
| lentils a day to reach my protein requirements. that's
| gotta be what, 2800 cal? _edit: 800g of lentils for 200g
| of protein, 2500 cal._
|
| im just thinking out loud here, but lentils alone
| wouldn't be adequate for me.
| teiferer wrote:
| Depends on "adequate". The average western diet over-
| consumes protein.
| parl_match wrote:
| okay? i said "adequate for me", not "adequate for the
| average western person".
| shimman wrote:
| I've been cooking more with lentils as well, so many
| cheap tasty recipes. I've been following this chickpea
| hack (cooking in microwave for like 5ish) to great
| success. Microwaving the chickpeas splits them into a
| crispy texture, then after that it's very flexible to
| create all kinds of dishes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EU76q3Vf3Q
|
| My favorite is pan frying them in a hot sauce + aromatics
| for a quick chickpea rice bowl, I even gotten into the
| habit of using chickpeas as a chicken replacement for
| many of my Mexican dishes.
|
| If you're use to the typical American diet, please try
| cooking more lentils! Very tasty, filling dishes, low on
| costs and high on nutrients.
|
| chicken 100g/27g of protein
|
| chickpeas 100g/19g of protein
|
| That's a good ratio for something that costs less than a
| dollar a can compared to chicken.
| parl_match wrote:
| fwiw at the level of protein i need to eat to build
| muscle mass (im weight training 3x a week), even that 27
| vs 19 difference starts to become a problem.
|
| people don't realize how challenging it is to eat 200g of
| protein a day, every day, for months, without eating like
| 3000cal lol
|
| that said, i do eat a lot of plant based protein. i love
| chickpeas and i also fuck w tofu a lot.
| blks wrote:
| There's a pretty versatile and tasty milk product called
| tvoroh in eastern/Central Europe. It has about 18g of
| protein, and 0-10% fat depending on what you're buying.
| So for low fat options it can be as low as 70-90kkal/100g
| with 18g of protein.
|
| What is the problem of consuming say 80-100% of whey
| protein? Not all of it has sweeteners.
| parl_match wrote:
| > What is the problem of consuming say 80-100% of whey
| protein?
|
| Well, for starters, that'd be completely fucking joyless.
| And on top of that, meat contains other nutrients that
| I'd have to account for (which is not hard tbh, but
| requires a little bit of studying and planning).
|
| > tasty milk product called tvoroh
|
| My gallbladder has never been at 100% and as a result, I
| have to eat a relatively low fat diet. This is not
| something a normal person faces. I eat a fair amount of
| low fat greek yogurt, though. Similar concept.
| thesz wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsEqV0Bjcs - that
| lecture refers a simple formulae to compute protein
| content from the amount of nitrogen. They count nitrogen
| in grams, then multiply by 6 to get amount of "available"
| protein. But, any antinutrients such as cyanides will
| count as proteins by this calculation.
|
| Lentils contain trypsin inhibitors, which contain
| inordinate amount of nitrogen that is counted as protein.
|
| While you do not eat these directly after cooking your
| lentils, you do not eat as much protein as you would
| think you do.
| malyk wrote:
| I think this is person dependant. A Kale salad makes almost
| no impact on my hunger, but a piece of bread makes me feel
| pretty full.
|
| Just as an example of an opposite experience.
|
| (american, vegetarian for 13 years, athletic, former meat
| eater, long carb centric diet that i'm trying to change)
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Well, if you've ever cooked down a cabbage or spinach or
| whatever, you'll see it basically takes up no space
| whatsoever... so yeah, kale on its own will take a while
| to fill you up.
| fooker wrote:
| > And to find out that's average???
|
| I think you're conflating 200g of protein with 200g of meat
| that has protein.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| They said "I eat pretty close to about a pound of meat a
| day during bulk, usually about 12-14oz"
| Aurornis wrote:
| The number quoted is the pre-processing weight. A lot of mass
| is lost during processing, drying, aging, in transport, to
| spoilage, and so on.
|
| The real number for meat consumption at the end consumer is
| about half that amount.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Bodybuilder? Powerlifter? Curious what specifically you mean
| that requires you to bulk vs. cut
| parl_match wrote:
| well im not bodybuilding anymore, so i guess im just in a
| constant bulk/caloric parity. i still think like that tho
| lol
| devilsdata wrote:
| Depending on the type of training you're doing, you're likely
| eating lean meat too, like chicken breasts and fish. Most
| people are much less picky about the kind of meat they eat,
| opting for fatty cuts or meat products high in salt and
| saturated fats.
| parl_match wrote:
| yes that's true
|
| im probably more conscious about what i eat than the
| average person, just on virtue of watching macros lol
| nradov wrote:
| I guess it's a matter of perspective and what you're used to.
| Some indigenous North American peoples used to subsist
| largely on bison for at least part of the year and often
| consumed 5 pounds or more of meat and other animal products
| per day. Was that too much?
| thesz wrote:
| I am not a weightlifter, I am an amateur powerlifter, and I
| do pretty intense resistance training for my age (54yo) and
| my weight (112kg) and I eat about 800g to 1kg a day of meat -
| duck, pork or beef. Even if I eat 1kg Wagyu beef, it would
| give me about 3000 calories, slightly less than 3500 calories
| I need to keep my muscle mass. I would happily eat even more
| meat but circumstances prevents me to do so.
|
| I used to drink protein shakes, but now I am actively against
| these. Artificial sweeteners provoke insulin release [1] [2]
| that leads to type-II diabetes.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2887503/
|
| [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10
| 568...
| locallost wrote:
| You can get protein powder without flavoring. I drink that
| either pure or with a little bit of flavored protein mixed
| in (something like 3:1) because the flavored stuff is so
| sweet I can't drink it. Some brands I could literally do 3
| parts flavorless, 1 part flavored and it would still taste
| too sweet.
| thesz wrote:
| Why you get protein powder of unknown origin instead of
| the meat?
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| you can get protein powder that doesn't contain artificial
| sweeteners. You can get protein powder that doesn't contain
| any sweetener. You can even buy pure protein powder without
| any additives at all.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| TIL the amount of animal suffering that goes into each person
| trying to be swole.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| Would be important to see how that number is being computed?
| If it is the amount of meat sold divided by number of people
| it may be misleading since there is a fair amount of wastage
| particularly in places like schools etc with kids filling
| plates that are never consumed.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. There is even more
| trimming that goes on as well. Chefs trim what's ordered,
| tallow may be rendered for non-consumptive reasons, and so
| on. Like a poster above, as an athlete I eat more meat than
| most people, and I don't seem to eat those numbers... I
| feel like we are missing some data points.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The thing is though you'll be eating (I presume) mostly lean
| meat. Chicken breast, white fish etc.
|
| When you compare the macros of that to sausages or ribs or
| even steak it's quite drastically different.
|
| Also I'd guess you aren't covering your meat in thick sugary
| sauce every time...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'd strongly prefer the government just not try to tell people
| what to eat, the incentives will always be perverse and
| nutrition science is anything but science in most cases.
|
| _EDIT_ down-thread to prove my point you 'll see people citing
| studies in favor of and against the new recommendations. The
| studies are almost always in animals or use self reported data
| with tiny sample sizes.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > not try to tell people what to eat
|
| food industry has to be policed -- The Jungle by Upton
| Sinclair is a high school level story featuring the meat
| packing industry. All around, additives and substitutes are
| more profitable than raw ingredients.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm clearly not advocating against basic safety oversight.
| It's worth noting that The Jungle was a work of fiction and
| Sinclair famously fabricated a lot of details wholesale.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| The whole point of government performing the function is that
| they don't profit from misleading you, rather their goal is
| the country's welfare.
|
| Obviously there are exceptions - particularly right now - but
| those are solved by rooting out corruption.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You say that but the food pyramid was devised but the
| agriculture lobby, and was never based on science.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Is this true? Specifically, "devised by" vs "influenced
| by" and "never based on science" meaning there was no,
| for example, attempt to improve heart disease rates?
|
| In any event, looking at the whole history of food
| guidance paints a clearer picture of my point. Happy to
| hear of alternatives though!
| reactordev wrote:
| You should see the local Golden Corral.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I bet the number of vegans and vegetarians in the US are also
| at their highest (and growing).
| woodruffw wrote:
| That's probably true, but I don't think vegans and
| vegetarians as a demographic overlap closely with
| demographics that tend to have heart disease.
|
| (Note that I am neither a vegetarian nor a vegan.)
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Vegans are probably mostly healthy. Vegetarians? Religious
| vegetarians and healthy vegetarians intersect but mostly
| don't ;).
| sebasv_ wrote:
| I remember seeing a paper a while back that found
| veganism increased your death by ischemic stroke
| probability threefold.
|
| Because of old age. Being vegan increased your odds
| threefold to die of old age instead of prematurely from
| disease.
|
| Apologies for not having a link to the source
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| nothing stops you from reading more about the topics before
| commenting on them haha
| Y_Y wrote:
| But it sure does seem like that sometimes
| woodruffw wrote:
| I thought that would fall under common sense, but if not:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10479225/
| nradov wrote:
| There may be some correlation but causality is unclear.
| India has a lot of vegetarians and also a high incidence of
| heart disease.
| watwut wrote:
| USA is actually healthier then in 1909. Life expectancy was
| going up the whole time. A whole bunch of malnutritiom related
| issues and diseases just disappeared.
|
| You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening
| results/predictions.
| 0xWTF wrote:
| "a chicken in every pot" is a political slogan that has been in
| active use from 17th century France to at least Herbert Hoover.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > the US's per capita consumption of meat
|
| That number seemed unreal to me, so I looked it up. I think it
| represents the total pre-processing weight, not the actual meat
| meat consumption. From Wikipedia:
|
| > As an example of the difference, for 2002, when the FAO
| figure for US per capita meat consumption was 124.48 kg (274 lb
| 7 oz), the USDA estimate of US per capita loss-adjusted meat
| consumption was 62.6 kg (138 lb)
|
| Processing, cutting into sellable pieces, drying, and
| spoilage/loss mean the amount of meat consumed is about half of
| that number.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Interestingly, ~12% of humans in the US are responsible for
| ~50% of beef consumption.
|
| > The US is the biggest consumer of beef in the world, but,
| according to new research, it's actually a small percentage
| of people who are doing most of the eating. A recent study
| shows that on any given day, just 12% of people in the US
| account for half of all beef consumed in the US.
|
| > Men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 were more
| likely to be in what the researchers dubbed as
| "disproportionate beef eaters", defined as those who, based
| on a recommended daily 2,200 calorie-diet, eat more than four
| ounces - the rough equivalent of more than one hamburger -
| daily. The study analyzed one-day dietary snapshots from over
| 10,000 US adults over a four-year period. White people were
| among those more likely to eat more beef, compared with other
| racial and ethnic groups like Black and Asian Americans.
| Older adults, college graduates, and those who looked up
| MyPlate, the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) online
| nutritional educational campaign, were far less likely to
| consume a disproportionate amount of beef.
|
| _High steaks society: who are the 12% of people consuming
| half of all beef in the US?_ -
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-
| usd... - October 20th, 2023
|
| _Demographic and Socioeconomic Correlates of
| Disproportionate Beef Consumption among US Adults in an Age
| of Global Warming_ -
| https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795 |
| https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15173795 - August 2023
|
| (my analysis of this is we can sunset quite a bit of US beef
| production and still be fine from a food supply and security
| perspective, as consumption greatly exceeds healthy
| consumption limits in the aggregate)
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Ah, yes, someone else who wants to stand in loco parentis
| over other adult humans.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| Worth noting there seems to be no upper limit for the anabolic
| response to protein ingestion, according to this study:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/
|
| What happens is that the excess of protein stays in your
| system, but, if you don't use the nutrient by exercising, the
| caloric excess will obviously make you fat.
|
| "These findings demonstrate that the magnitude and duration of
| the anabolic response to protein ingestion is not restricted
| and has previously been underestimated in vivo in humans."
| ixtli wrote:
| I think its dangerous to engage with this website as an earnest
| attempt to make people healthier as individuals or as a
| population and not a metastasis of woo-fueld ignorance of data
| and trends like you're talking about whos goal is ultimately
| just to sell shit to desperate people.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Small nit - this is probably assumed, but I would like the unit
| to be explicit: _Yearly_ per capita pounds of meat.
|
| That is, how many pounds of meat the average American eats in a
| year. An increase of 100 pounds means about an extra quarter-
| pound a day.
| rayiner wrote:
| I think the key point is the relative ratios of meat versus
| processed carbs. Right now we have government guidance telling
| people to eat more processed carbs than meat, and that's
| backward.
|
| Americans also just need to eat less period, but that's a
| separable issue.
| uoaei wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more likely that it's calories, not meat per se,
| that is the main proxy for measuring our health decline?
| jjoe wrote:
| I processed the Scientific Report Appendices (PDF) through
| PaperSplain. I'm sharing the analysis here for those interested:
|
| https://papersplain.com/sample/62d71c8ecb6411e042f346088c231...
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Interesting, this is not bad at all. Maybe the only real issue is
| prescribing a lot of red meat which categorically isn't that good
| for you.
| collaborative wrote:
| Nothing wrong with grains as long as they aren't the processed
| GM'd ones you find everywhere. Bake wholegrain spelt bread at
| home and you can make that 70% of your diet no problem. People
| used to only eat bread before, they were fine
| margalabargala wrote:
| Basically none of this is true.
|
| Grains are way too high in carbohydrates and even whole grains
| tend not to be complete proteins. Eating little but bread,
| whether it's wheat or spelt or something else, will malnourish
| you.
|
| The impacts of health of processed grains is large. The impacts
| on health of GM'd grains is zero.
| eweise wrote:
| Dairy is not healthy fats.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| This is the first .gov website I've seen that does not list any
| sort of agency, branch of government, commission, whatever,
| that's behind it.
|
| Yes, I see the National Design Studio built it -- but presumably
| they aren't the ones writing nutritional guidance. Is this FDA?
| HHS?
| wavemode wrote:
| Nutritional guidelines are developed by USDA.
|
| This newest iteration appears to have had input from HHS under
| RFK Jr: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-dietary-
| guidel...
| jaredwiener wrote:
| This also appears to be from USDA, as per their _other_
| website with the same info:
| https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/
| jaredwiener wrote:
| My point really was that it seems odd that this information
| isn't readily available on the website. Why hide it?
| didibus wrote:
| What exactly has changed ? And how does it differ say to the
| Canadian one: https://food-
| guide.canada.ca/themes/custom/wxtsub_bootstrap/... ?
| owentbrown wrote:
| When did white flour bread become a whole grain?
|
| There's a picture of a loaf of bread next to the word "whole
| grains".
| fabbbbb wrote:
| Unfortunately there seems to be no good aligned definition of
| what (highly) processed food is. 1,2
|
| Whole grain bread or infant formula can be "highly processed"
| despite very healthy.
|
| In the end someone else cooks for you and packages it. They can
| cook healthy or not or in between, add a lot of salt or little,
| .. as always it's more complex.
|
| 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1
|
| 2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nutrition-research-r...
| max_ wrote:
| >Whole grain bread or infant formula are "highly processed"
| despite very healthy.
|
| "processed" and "healthy" are oxymorons.
|
| I think it's better to tell people to restrict themselves to
| "whole foods".
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I believe you're missing their point. As well as
| demonstrating a complete lack of information about infant
| formula.
| fabbbbb wrote:
| To me it seems the point is "processed" == bad. Isn't it?
| And NOVA seems to be the gold standard for what's
| "processed".
|
| Of course there's better things as whole grain bread in
| plastic foil (whole grain bread freshly made) or infant
| formula (breastfeeding). But they are more healthy than
| other things that rank better in NOVA.
| fabbbbb wrote:
| Did you find evidence for your two claims?
|
| You can compose a pretty healthy diet from what's called
| "processed" (prepared, cooked and packaged). From the very
| same pyramid.
| malfist wrote:
| Processed and healthy are not oxymorons.
|
| For one, most all preservation methods are processing,
| including canning, freezing and drying. You can't possibly
| claim that frozen or canned veggies are unhealthy
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| besides being loud in the media and policy, does it matter?
|
| to keep this focused on hacker news. this is like asking the
| programming community to solve "some intractable social
| problem," and then sometimes you get an answer, "well, what we
| need is, a new kind of open source license."
|
| disputes over guidelines and the meaning of highly processed,
| outside the academic humanities context, is kind of pointless
| right? if you are talking about cultural influence - you can't
| coerce people to eat (or not eat) something in this country, so
| cultural influence is the main lever government can pull
| regarding food - the answer to everything is, "What does Ja
| Rule think?" (https://www.okayplayer.com/dave-chappelles-ja-
| rule-joke-is-h...) that is, what do celebrities say and do? And
| that's why we're at where we are at, the celebrities are now
| "running" the HHS.
|
| There's a definition for highly processed food, it's whatever
| Ja Rule says it is. Are you getting it?
| sva_ wrote:
| They can also be a machine that might add a non-negligible
| amount of mineral oils and possibly other stuff to your food.
| The guideline to use should be that the ingredient list should
| be as short as possible. If it has more than 5 ingredients,
| that's already incredibly suspicious in my opinion. The problem
| is that some stuff (like a mineral oil contamination) doesn't
| even have to be declared on the ingredient list.
|
| For example, normal simple bread should only have 4 or maybe 5
| ingredients.
| throw7 wrote:
| This is a good reset. I just imagine if this was put out by a
| Democrat white house, the republicans would be blowing a gasket.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| _Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants._
|
| - Michael Pollan
| monster_truck wrote:
| The accessbility of this website is deplorable. There is no way
| anyone responsible for this website has our best interests in
| mind
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Eating real foods (e.g., whole foods rather than highly processed
| foods) is good advice overall. But replacing mono and poly
| unsaturated fats with saturated fats is total nonsense. We have
| thousands of studies spanning decades showing that increased
| saturated fat consumption leads to elevated LDL-C and elevated
| LDL-C is causitively associated with higher rates of CVD. There's
| no reason to replace olive oil with butter and beef tallow.
| malkia wrote:
| Make Jerkey Without Sugar Again!
| Havoc wrote:
| Think it's telling that all the things shown first and most
| prominently in their food pyramid just so happen to have massive
| lobbies. Beef, Egg, Diary & chicken.
|
| Doesn't seem terrible but that already makes me very suspicious
| of the reliability of this
| crims0n wrote:
| Fish is also right there. They are all high quality, readily
| available protein sources. It should not be a surprise that
| they show up so prominently as a recommendation.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| All of this coming while the administration guts science funding,
| food inspections, vaccine guidelines, handouts to farmers
| producing nutrient poor foods, corporatist policies creating more
| food deserts.
|
| thoroughly discredits what they are trying to do, even if there
| is some good in here.
| sdo72 wrote:
| I don't think it's even about low carb vs. high protein to begin
| with. Many countries and regions in the world are fine with a
| high-carb diet, and people there live long, healthy lives.
|
| Americans eat so much processed food simply because it is much
| cheaper than fresh food. Processed food is made to get consumers
| addicted (through convenience, taste, etc.) and encourage them to
| consume much more. Fresh food is almost the opposite.
|
| I grew up in a country where freshly made food is actually
| cheaper than processed food, even to this day. People who stick
| to a traditional diet are mostly thin, while those who stick to a
| processed food diet gain a lot of weight.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| This should be top comment
|
| When I was visiting the US I was shocked how much more
| expensive "real" food is. Here I am spending more if I eat out
| or processed food versus cooking my own food at home. In the US
| it was basically the inverse, didn't make any sense to me. (N=1
| and 10 year old experience, but it seems to have only gotten
| more extreme since)
| poemxo wrote:
| The messaging on the website pretty much agrees with you, then.
| AstroBen wrote:
| > Americans eat so much processed food simply because it is
| much cheaper than fresh food.
|
| I don't understand how people come to this conclusion
|
| Beans/grains/legumes are cheap
|
| Frozen veg is dirt cheap (and retains its nutrition as good as,
| or better than fresh). In-season fruit and veg
|
| Which foods are more expensive?
|
| People are door-dashing their salaries away and complaining
| about the price of fresh food...
|
| Convenience and addiction makes more sense, certainly not price
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not as bad as expected. Healthy fats and whole grains with lots
| of fruit and vegetables. Emphasis on minimal processing.
|
| It might even be better messaging than the healthy plate because
| it shows the foods visually which is what some people need to
| see.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| I'm so confused. Why would the United States care about people's
| health? It feels out of character for this administration given
| the times.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| It's a marketing campaign and that's all it is. Zero substance
| on the website about what they're doing to make sure more
| people actually eat like this.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Looks like a very good effort, shame some people will disagree
| with it just because it doesn't match their politics.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| What a brilliant marketing campaign for the Trump administration
| to look like they're doing something positive.
|
| Yet, I see absolutely nothing on this website to suggest how they
| are going to change American diets. Do they think these
| guidelines don't already exist somewhere?
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Yeah, I don't feel comfortable with anything this government says
| for at least the next few years. It doesn't matter how sound the
| advice is. There is an agenda baked into everything.
| pedalpete wrote:
| This reads to me as protein first, then veg.
|
| American's don't seem to have a protein restriction problem. Look
| at your average burger, it is mostly meat, a bit of lettuce, and
| a bunch of low-quality bread.
|
| I had a "salad" in SF when I was visiting, it was the largest
| chicken breast I've ever seen, a bunch of bacon and I had to
| practically go searching for the few leaves of spinach.
|
| Lastly, is it really the guideline that are going to help, or is
| it accessibility?
| scwilbanks wrote:
| The guidelines are good, but to make a real impact, we need a
| federally funded k-12 breakfast and lunch program that is free
| for all students.
| didibus wrote:
| The only change from the previous dietary recommendations that I
| can see is that they recommend a bit of a smaller portion of
| veggies and a bit of a bigger portion of protein. Everything else
| seems exactly the same.
|
| Am I missing something?
|
| It also seems like the bigger protein portion over veggies is
| strangely what I would expect from someone on TRT...
| kkaske wrote:
| In a way, "eat real food" functions less as scientific advice and
| more as a cultural signal. It could be seen as a rejection of
| industrialized diets and all the complexities around that. The
| idea of "Eat Real Food" might be a better default when you are
| hungry and looking for food. I guess time will tell.
| spruce_tips wrote:
| wow, it's almost like this makes sense
| ixtli wrote:
| Wow thank god it's my fault im sick and i can make personal
| choices to stop chronic conditions! I was worried it might have
| something to do with material conditions i live in but also can
| not control, or worse that i might require medicine! Relatedly
| its a great thing that "real food" access isn't class-based.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Really strange comment. You're offended by the implication that
| what we eat may impact our health?
|
| Regarding the class comment, sure a access to some food is
| class based, but pretty much all westerners can afford basic
| "real food". I know because I've lived on minimum wage and
| could buy eggs, rice, beans, chicken thigh, etc.
| dazhengca wrote:
| Way too much scroll jacking for me to be honest, probably the
| worst site I've seen of their team, but still for government site
| not bad
| malectro wrote:
| Drives me nuts that people still build these in 2026. Scroll
| animations should only ever be used to supplement existing
| scrolling. If scrolling is replaced entirely by an arbitrary
| animation, there's no longer anything to anchor the action, and
| basic UX feels broken.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Phew! Finally Americans can stop eating according to the old
| dietary guidelines! Everyone clear out your pantries and fridges
| and get with the new hotness. Those old guidelines, you see, were
| the cause of all of the obesity and poor health!
|
| ...wait, you mean to tell me extraordinarily few Americans
| actually listened to guidelines? That this is all performative
| nonsense?
|
| Honestly, it isn't as ignorant as I expected (although it of
| course pushes for "whole milk" and other bits of ignorant
| advice), but it's basically playing on the ignorance of the
| readers. Americans already eat some of the most amounts of
| protein worldwide -- yet of course proclaims an imaginary "war on
| protein" strawman -- yet also are one of the fattest and least
| healthy countries.
|
| People actually following the prior guidelines in earnest would
| likely be in great metabolic shape. But Americans don't: They
| gobble cheeseburgers and drink a dozen cokes and complain that
| stupid big medicine is trying to con them, while reciting some
| nonsense a supplement huckster chiropractor told them on YouTube.
| mattanimation wrote:
| I just learned there is a .gov design studio... la what?
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I liked the new guidelines given here [1]. However, I disagree
| with the protein target recommendation. Feels way too much for a
| normal healthy adult with reasonable activity.
|
| > _Protein target: 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per
| day._
|
| [1]: https://cdn.realfood.gov/Daily%20Serving%20Sizes.pdf
| kibitzor wrote:
| Agreed, this protein target is high for likely many people.
|
| Results from this meta-analysis [1] says
|
| > _protein intakes at amounts greater than ~1.6 g /kg/day do
| not further contribute RET [resistance exercise
| training]-induced gains in FFM [fat-free mass]._
|
| Said more plainly: if you're working out to gain muscle,
| anything more than 1.6g/kg/day won't help your muscle gains.
|
| For those curious about why, see Figure 5. Americans also get
| too much protein already, ~20% more than recommended [2]. There
| are negative effects from too much protein (~>2g/kg/day) like
| kidney stones, heart disease, colon cancer [3]. Going back to
| the 1.2-1.6 g/kg/day range, this can be a good range if you're
| already working out, so get out there and walk/run/weight
| lift/swim/bike!
|
| [1]: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/52/6/376.full.pdf
|
| [2]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/protein-is-important-but-
| were-...
|
| [3]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/when-it-comes-to-
| pr...
| justinai6 wrote:
| Protein is way underated for overall health that 1.2-1.6g per
| kg of body weight (0.54-0.73g per pound) seems about right but
| its mostly directly related to lean mass. Most people don't
| realize how much they actually need.
|
| There's a lot of misinformation and stereotypes surrounding
| protein consumption--often portrayed as something only for
| bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts.
|
| But for people aging, people looking for strength, folks
| looking for reducing fat and feeling more full. Protein is
| extremely helpful
| nektro wrote:
| i dont have the expertise to say whether this is good info but
| its nice to see other folks saying it is. but a government
| website being one of these scrollbar hacks is atrocious
| kayge wrote:
| The new pyramid looks like a decent step in the right direction,
| and as other commenters have already mentioned: better
| definitions of "highly processed" vs "real food" might be helpful
| (but I think most of us probably have a fairly clear idea of what
| they mean).
|
| Two more things I think should be considered:
|
| 1. Change the Nutrition Facts labels to say "Lipids" instead of
| "Fats". Seems like no matter how many times "fat doesn't make you
| fat" is repeated, many people are still scared of consuming fat.
|
| 2. Reconsider or recalculate the old 2000 calorie per day
| guidance. I have no actual data to support this -- fitness and
| nutrition self-experimentation is just a hobby of mine -- but I
| have a feeling that the "Average American" (which may also need
| to be defined somewhere) probably only needs around 1500 calories
| per day to maintain a healthy weight. There is obviously a wide
| range of needs depending on height, activity level, occupation,
| etc. but I feel like if someone is considering a 500 calorie
| treat, it would be more helpful if they thought "wow this is 1/3
| of my daily calories... maybe I should split it with a friend"
| instead of "meh this is only 25% of my daily calories <chomp>"
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Good God! There's too much scrolling involved. Is this some
| cunning way to make me exercise?
| smy20011 wrote:
| According to
| https://cdn.realfood.gov/Daily%20Serving%20Sizes.pdf, their
| recommendations do not meet their calories goal. Eg, for 2000
| calories, you can eat 4 egg, 3 cup of milk, 4 slice of bread, 2
| apple and 3 tbsp of oil per day.
|
| Total calories will be 1,608 kcal/day.
|
| It's a very depressing diet menu.
| tolerance wrote:
| For those who are wondering: https://klim.co.nz/fonts/die-
| grotesk/#information
|
| I think Kris Sowersby is my favorite contemporary typographer.
|
| https://klim.co.nz/collections/untitled/
| https://klim.co.nz/collections/tiempos/
| https://klim.co.nz/collections/soehne/
| cdrnsf wrote:
| I couldn't finish scrolling to the bottom of this site. The
| performance is awful and all of the animations are extremely
| jarring.
|
| Nutrition is important, but this administration's health policy
| under RFK Jr. is an unmitigated disaster.
| dillydogg wrote:
| I really don't see how this is so different than what
| nutritionists have said for years. This reads as if the guans
| before was to drink soda and eat fat free candy all day. The
| three sentence dietary guidance still holds:
|
| 1. Eat food 2. Not too much 3. Mostly plants
|
| Though the government's position seems to be at odds with #3. I
| would encourage more beans and greens, personally.
| maelito wrote:
| Bullying Europe but hoping to live like Europeans.
| _qua wrote:
| The most important dietary intervention most people need is just
| eating less. The content of what they eat is secondary. It's not
| unimportant, it just matters less when you are still wildly
| overweight.
| exabrial wrote:
| Hijacking the scroll wheel, even in 2025, is still unbelievably
| annoying. Please stop.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Anyone else disappointed because they didn't show the Swanson
| Pyramid Of Greatness?
| teiferer wrote:
| Also, don't vaccinate your kids against measles.
|
| And if you happen to run over a bear cub, drive it to Manhattan
| and dump it in Central Park.
| klik99 wrote:
| Is there any effort to make real food more affordable for most
| Americans?
|
| Is there any proof that "much of chronic disease is linked to
| diet and lifestyle"?
|
| Is our bar so low that we give RFK credit for saying "eat real
| food" which everyone knows, while cutting vaccination
| recommendations, defunding public health and making our health
| care worse? The implication that chronic illness is a "lifestyle"
| problem is victim blaming, sure you can point to a lot of
| individual cases where this is the case, but the main issue is
| access to good, affordable food. I'm convinced the one thing that
| ties the varied MAGA coalition together is a belief that the
| problems of modern America are moral failings of the masses. Many
| of the coalition truly believe it, and the people rigging the
| system are more than happy to fund them to distract from their
| looting, just as the sugar industry funded blaming fat for
| obesity.
|
| I don't like to be this righteous on HN, but RFK wagging his
| finger about how "diet and lifestyle" causes most chronic
| disease, which is where 90% healthcare costs go to, just upsets
| me. If you truly believe that, then who cares if people suffer
| from chronic disease. Go ahead and gut public health and the CDC,
| most people with chronic diseases brought it upon themselves!
| Doctor says "Eat Real Food".
|
| The only hope I have is that he's committed enough to battle
| lobbyists and introduce more food regulations, like he did with
| food dye. That's the tough work, against entrenched power
| structures and real risk. Until then, it's all just talk.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Seems like bog-standard stuff doctors and books have been
| recommending for decades now. Canada has had a food plate like
| this [1] for a long time. It's a good step forward but I wonder
| what the actual implications are. How many people didn't already
| know this, how much does it change behavior and how will it
| impact other government programs?
|
| [1] https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/
| nice_byte wrote:
| "We're ending the war on protein"
|
| WTF is this even referring to? literally everyone here is
| _obsessed_ with their protein intake, regardless of whether
| they're a meat-eater or not. of all the things America's at war
| with, protein is definitely not one of them.
| gowld wrote:
| Unreadable clunky website.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| > Protein target: 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per
| day.
|
| Since this is an official US government website, are we now
| officially using metric?
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