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Comment by arzig | Hacker News Reader

As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling / recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young. Cereals were basically the best thing to eat because how else where you going to fill the foundation of the pyramid with your 11 (exact number is fuzzy) recommended servings of grains per day. The pyramid was shown proudly on all the boxes. Meanwhile protein and fats were to be minimized. It may not be causal, but it certainly didn’t help the obesity problem in this country that the government explicitly recommended everyone fill up in foods that aren’t actually filling.

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It’s not the government’s fault when they said cereal, they meant healthy oats and grains but instead people bought fruity pebbles. I remember being a kid in the 80s and it was very much understood that the healthy cereal was the plain cheerios and unsweetened corn flakes and stuff that nobody (especially kids) wanted to eat-or we’d just add a ton of sugar to it at home.

If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret/ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.

The food pyramid was nonsense, regardless of interpretation. No one needs to eat that much grain - and did you forget that it explicitly listed dairy as a nutritional requirement?

I’m not arguing for the pyramid by any means or saying that it wasn’t flawed.

My critique is that instead of poking wholes in it, debating if eggs are or are not healthy and such, we really just normalized massive portions and fried/fast food/soft drinks/sugar in everything/etc. Which completely misses the spirit of what the pyramid was even aspiring to be. We didn’t even consider the pyramid when we made our food choices. We just allowed our gluttony to lead us where it may. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. We knew very well we were making poor choices along the way, but gave in to our desires. (Using “we” as collective US generalization, not trying to speak about anyone specifically, I’m sure someone here has a counterpoint but the obesity stats represent us collectively )

I don’t disagree but I do wonder how much the food pyramid played into developing those habits. Think of all the schools and parents trying to follow it and conditioning their children into eating all that grain and dairy every day. I don’t think it’s solely responsible but I don’t think its effects were negligible.

Where's the proof that getting so much grains (proportionally) is good?

Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad, and they get what they expect. In Europe we get very angry when the government is corrupt and bad.

Maybe instead of trying to spread your meme of "government always bad", you try to take on the European meme of "government needs to be good or everything goes to hell"?

America’s government - as in, the civil service - is neither corrupt nor bad. It is a very well-run country! You need only visit America to witness how excellent it is in many ways. There is a reason that, despite its faults, America is still the most innovative and economically powerful country in the world.

In terms of Europe, the level of corruption and competence seems to be highly variable depending on the country. So again it seems misplaced to make a broad assertion like the one you made.

It's well-run in some aspects and disastrous in others. The fact that the US is an economic powerhouse is due to other things, not the quality of its federal and local government.

Tons of natural resources and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity, these immigrants serving as the bedrock that instilled the current US culture.

Before anyone tries anything funny I'm neither American, nor Western European, nor Protestant.

I’m sure this is a nice founding narrative that brings comfort to a lot of Americans of Western European ancestry. I think USA is better off inventing a more inclusive one in the coming century though (I suppose they already have in parts)

Taiwan has no natural resources yet is an economic powerhouse. Russia has vast natural resources and a poor economy.

True. But it appears you have ignored half of the comment you're replying to, the part about the immigrants that moved to the US.

It's entirely possible that the US would've also succeeded had it opened its doors to millions of East Asian immigrants, but that didn't happen.

It did open doors to Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who have contributed greatly to the US economy (in spite of racism against them).

Practically irrelevant. Brazil and Peru opened their doors to Asian immigrants but just like in the US, they were second wave immigrants and they couldn't save either of those countries.

You need the initial immigrants to do the heavy lifting, plus they majorly control politics.

Brazil and Peru have unfree markets. Immigrants can't help.

In what way does Brazil have unfree markets vs the US? Either now or during the last 150-200 years?

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpol...

The doors were never open to Chinese immigrants except for limited periods.

Mass Chinese migration to the US only really began after the Civil War, and was quickly locked down with the Chinese Exclusion Act [0] only a few decades after the doors were "opened". Even then, naturalization of Chinese citizens as US citizens was still restricted. There even had to be a Supreme Court case to establish that the children of Chinese immigrants born in the US were US citizens! [1]

The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1943, when a small number (literally hundreds, almost nothing) of Chinese migrants were allowed in, with that increasing slowly over time.

Even today, Chinese and Indian (and others, but the impact is greatest for high population countries) migration is limited by the H1B cap and multi-decade green card queues. If the queue to get a green card is so long that you'll die first [2], you have effectively been banned from permanent residency and naturalization.

My point is simple: doors were open to European migrants, so European migrants built the US and formed its national character. Other methods and types of migration may have also worked to build the US, but we'll never know because the US restricted them heavily and still does.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

[2]: https://www.wionews.com/india-news/more-than-400000-indians-...

Chinese laborers, for example, built the western part of the transcontinental railroad. A pretty substantial contribution.

And FDR interned 110,000 Japanese Americans in WW2. My dad who lived in Long Beach at the time said much of this was motivated by envy, as the Japanese Americans ran prosperous farms and businesses.

Consider the descriptive part about the immigrants to be an example of the following cultural archetype: "ambitious, motivated, solid work ethic, respect for education and legitimate entreprise".

Any other settlers of the same kind would have succeeded. As a counterexample Spanish and Portuguese settlers largely failed to establish similar societies.

A fundamental issue is overlooked here. The US was established as a free market country. People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy. The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.

Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.

What does "free market" mean in this context?

Free markets don't change meaning with context. Google the definition of a free market, I'll go with that.

The US has massive government intervention so if you go by the standard definition, it isn't a free market.

Free markets aren't a binary thing. There's a range from full free market to total communism, with all points along that range.

The more free market an economy, the better it does. The more communist it is, the worse it does.

C'mon, be serious and name an actual "total communism" entity, please.

I have no love for nominally Communist States - they're authoritarian centralised party states a gnats arse or less from full dictatorships perpetrating the lie that they're on the path toward some socialist | communist goal - but they are all far away removed from such things.

> A fundamental issue is overlooked here. The US was established as a free market country.

The playbook for a succesful free market economy is to use protectionism at home and (if applicable: if the state can be called imperialistic) impose free market principles on subject nations so that domestic corporations can exploit them.

Look at South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.

> People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy.

Look at the Gini coefficient of the US.

> The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.

Not Russia.

> Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.

Chile had a coup in 1973 which removed the social democratic leader from power and installed a neoliberal government. Neoliberalism is the modern free market incarnation. Why didn't they thrive?

> The playbook for a succesful free market economy is to use protectionism at home

Nope. Protectionism hurts the economy because it is an impediment to free trade.

> South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.

Protectionism hurts the economy, but not enough to sink it. Free markets are remarkably resilient to damage.

> Not Russia.

Russia's economy is a kleptocracy.

> Chile

Installing a neoliberal government doesn't mean they actually instituted a free market. Chile has, as I said, gone back and forth between free markets and socialism. The country would get on its feet with the free markets, then switch back to socialism until it was on its knees again.

Ah okay I see, "it was not true capitalism" :)

Progressives are entirely capable of wrecking free market success.

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2020/fall-chile#expla...

To be fair (although I don't agree with him in the slightest): he did say “free market” to begin with, which in the common vernacular is contrasted with more state intervention.

> and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity,

That's a long-winded way to say Settler Colonialism.

Brazil, Argentina, etc also had settler colonialism. Distinctions are useful.

What's the distinction? That the settlers were inferior catholics? (Of course other Europeans at later stages like in Argentina.)

In any case you can cherry-pick any variable you want when talking about such disparate nations.

I expanded in another comment:

> "ambitious, motivated, solid work ethic, respect for education and legitimate entreprise".

Spanish and Portuguese settlers, for reasons that are beyond me, didn't manage to create societies where these values are at their core.

IMHO the US government is extremely corrupt. Many important regulatory agencies are captured by industry and run with a revolving door of conflict of interest. Corporate donors have basically completely captured Congress. We have a melding of industry and government, seen most visibly through our foreign policy, that makes us a quasi-fascist authoritarian country.

The revolving door is mostly at the political appointee level. Most of the leadership is appointed.

America is an innovative and economically powerful country because the role of government has been consciously and deliberately curtailed.

The key "crossing of the rubicon" that America has not yet reached is the normalization of everyday corruption (bribes, local corruption as a rule, etc).

We have done that in the federal political sphere for quite a while. The last vestiges of actually doing political right for the moral principle was probably back in the 80s or 90s.

There is a lot of corruption in the backwaters, and again at the high levels of large city government, but in general in the civil service there isn't corruption.

Likewise the military is still relatively uncorrupt in its administration, outside of the outlandish contracts of the military industrial complex.

It's probably because functionally speaking the "elite" capture most of the corruption money at the highest levels, and won't tolerate the inefficiency of low level corruption.

Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad because history shows that government to be corrupt and bad.

We don't get it because we expect it. We get it because history repeats.

Which is why we setup ours to be limited in power and why, as time goes on and that power expands, it gets worse and worse and why stuff like POTUS elections are now life and death when they used to be largely figure heads.

Surely you can’t mean “Europe”, you must have a certain country or small set of countries in mind here, and be thinking of a very recent time period.

The government in Serbia never struck me as especially uncorrupted, but I also don't think this has caused everything there to go to hell. Laws exist and are largely enforced, it just happens you can bribe your way out of most fines.

I met friends there looking for any possible way to come to Canada or the US largely to escape the systematic corruption which exists in some Balkan countries.

People say this but they -mostly- just want to live somewhere wealthier.

Would anybody move from Serbia to USA/Canada if they where equally wealthy? What if Serbia was even wealthier but still more corrupt?

Intelligent students of history expect the government to be corrupt and bad.

It works the same in every country, from Japan to Russia to Germany to the USA to Venezuela.

It's the principal-agent problem, writ large.

I live in both the US and Germany (roughly 50/50) and the level of corruption is about the same in both places.

A lot of it is so ingrained in the culture you don't register it anymore. It gets automatically filed under "the way things work here" and becomes relatively invisible.

> Intelligent students of history expect the government to be corrupt and bad.

That is not quite true. Historically, the quality of both government and corruption varied ... and goverments worldwide also did quite a lot of good.

The "all of government is always bad" is pure ideological flex.

The specific places that rot varies, but the fact that governments all tend toward corruption is widely consistent.

If that weren't true, you could show me a large, industrialized country that has very low governmental corruption. You can't. There aren't any.

Any large groups of people tend toward corruption.

That being said, in general corruption in western countries is massively lower then elsewhere. They actually function well with low levels of corruption in general.

The big corruption tend to be on the east.

I vehemently disagree with this premise.

The corruption in western nations is more sophisticated, and is better at hiding in plain sight. The type in the east is more furtive, probably out of an effort to "save face".

They differ in style, but not degree.

Over here we call it special euphemisms like "lobbying" and "regulatory capture" instead of "bribery" and "kickbacks". It makes people regard it differently, giving it an air of respectability.

Given the size of the corruption industry in the US, this was inevitable, as it would need a surface level of legitimacy to be able to attract and employ the sheer numbers of people who operate the machinery of the flows of bribery money from industry to servile lawmakers.

Why do you think there are so few major retailers in the US? Media companies? ISPs? Insurance companies? Hospitals? Health care networks? Pharmacies? Pharmaceutical companies? Grocery stores? Food manufacturers? Banks?

It's not lack of supply or lack of demand. Many people wish to manufacture cheap insulin or build better ISPs or more cheap surgery clinics or better grocery stores.

Soon it will be the same with social networks. They already achieved it with app stores, which is the only meaningful publishing today, apps having killed the web.

Anything that has broad social appeal or need which subsequently results in large recurring cash flows will get regulated upon so that the cash doesn't flow to anyone the existing power structure doesn't want to enrich. (I have a separate theory that the current anti-Musk backlash is engineered because of an accidental failure of the system implementing this longstanding policy, due to the double whammy of unexpected breakout success of both Tesla stock and SpaceX operational scaling simultaneously. He sure is lucky he has a US passport whilst trying to do what he's doing.)

People like to ascribe this to "late stage capitalism" but for every dysfunctional industry lacking real competition or consumer choice, I can point to a bad set of laws or regulations paid for by that industry. It's a failure of the state to do its job to protect end users and opportunity and liberty.

When copyright was about to expire, Disney went to the legislature with checkbook in hand. Laws are for sale in the USA.

Why does the illusion of consumer choice become more and more farcical every year?

The US regulatory machine is totally corrupt in almost everything it touches. We just reclassified it so it seems less shady than it is, but the story of Comcast and the FCC stands clear as just one of many illustrations.

(Or Bell in Canada, or DTAG in Germany. It works the same everywhere.)

> Why do you think there are so few major retailers in the US? Media companies? ISPs? Insurance companies? Hospitals? Health care networks? Pharmacies? Pharmaceutical companies? Grocery stores? Food manufacturers? Major entertainment media franchises? Entertainment venues?

Because free markets don't actually stop the accumulation of private market power. The natural state of most markets is monopoly or oligopoly due to efficiencies of scale and collusion. Governments at least provide some degree of legal oversight to this private power.

None of the industries I listed are operating in a free market, so I am not sure why you brought that concept up as a scapegoat.

All of the large incumbents in those industries in western countries are protected by laws paid for, engineered, and often literally written by those industries. Places where this is not the case are the exception, not the rule.

> The natural state of most markets is monopoly or oligopoly due to efficiencies of scale and collusion.

The monopolies are held in place by government license or other regulations used to suppress competition. It's not a natural state.

This is a conjecture held as axiomatic by some economists and not by others. There's no strong evidence for it and there's been a lack of opportunities to observe natural experiments (we have not seen advanced economies exist outside the scope of interventionist states). But there's plenty of examples of private economic power tending toward concentration (cartels, etc.) when permitted.

That's a weird thing to say. First "large" seems like a weasel word. Second, there are HUGE differences in corruption between say Russia and the US. While we complain about the US, the level of corruption is orders of magnitude lower than Russia.

Orders of magnitude differences in corruption matters a lot.

I find so many people in m part of the US that are like completely oblivious to what goes on around the world. Its like Plato’s cave, they only know how bad things can get based on a limited view of the world.

As a European, that's a very superficial reddit-tier understanding. Europe is far far from the civic paradise of engaged citizens you're trying to portray. Not even to mention the EU government, which hugely affects everybody's life but which the overwhelming majority of citizens never interact with.

I wouldn't say American government is especially corrupt. What it is is bureaucratic, inefficient, and counterproductive, because it implements policies that have counterproductive side effects.

Like rent control.

You haven't been paying attention for the last 20 years.

Did you actually base what you ate on the food pyramid?

I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.

I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.

We did because the schools followed the food pyramid. So they pushed foods on us that were low fat and high carb (like the ‘healthy’ chocolate skim milk, and no whole milk). Margarine instead of butter. Government food recommendations are HUGE deal to kids in public schools in the United States.

Ah, that is a good point. I was a poor sack lunch kid so I never considered that aspect.

Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.

It very much depends on where you live. Many Republicans were livid about Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch effort and that inspired unnecessary rancor over what shouldn’t be controversial.

The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.

It's so weird to me that free school lunches for children are something that is not 100% immediately obvious and uncontroversial and beyond any discussion.

Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).

I can't imagine eating high carb and margarine is a problem for children. They burn anything they swallow especially if you stick to decent carbs like bread or rice.

It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).

Until recently, margarine was high in trans fats, which are especially unhealthy.

Margarine and butter both sort under "fat" in old dietary guidelines. The reason schools (or anyone) preferred the former was because of cost.

I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.

Directly and indirectly.

Buying decisions from parents was influenced. Advertising influenced people. School lunches. What parents would feed other kids after activities. Habits of people "never giving it a second thought" were still being shaped by these forces. Even if someone only thinks about it a fraction of the time, it moves the needle. If my mom ate 10% more processed carbs than her parents and passed those habits to me, I was impacted. Rinse Repeat for 60 years.

> I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.

Actually, to a shocking degree, yes.

I grew up in an immigrant family, so my parents were far too busy working to do non-mainstream research on diet. I grew up eating 2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time.

If your parents aren't well-off enough to do dedicated research into the optimal diet for their children (which describes most of American parents), then you'll follow the advertised government guidelines.

As diets go, meat, rice and vegetables isn’t that bad.

Cereal… not so great.

Agreed, the thing is my kids can afford the calories that I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Starch has energy, habits about balance are important too.

Rice is s cereal.

The main problem is the processing, not the underlying grain ;)

> processing <

rice crispies, and puffed rice in the 5 gallon bag [next to the puffed wheat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice

Yeah m, thought th ‘breakfast’ part of cereal was a given since that’s what we’re discussing.

That sounds like a perfectly fine diet.

>2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time

I mean, except for the white rice (which should always be whole, like all grains in your diet) this seems like a good diet. Of course it all depends on how much stuff you were given to eat, but there is nothing wrong with this

“Should” is a hefty term. If you’re doing fine on white rice by all means eat white rice.

"Must" is a hefty term, not "should". Ask any nutritionist and they'll tell you whole rice is always the better choice for nutrition

Sure. But it don’t matter much

Go and look how many vitamins and nutrients are lost making white grains and how much the glycemic index rises.

It matters a lot, especially if it's a main part of your diet.

Everything is relative. But imo it’s VERY unlikely to matter “a lot”. Everything is trickier if you’re trying to lose weight, but white rice vs brown is a tiny offender relative to the more common culprits

Why are you talking about losing weight?

That is a common context for consideration of nutrition.

Whole grain rice contains higher levels of arsenic. A little bit is fine, but 2+ bowls per day may be problematic.

And getting the majority of your calories from grains of any type is in no way a "good diet". That myth needs to die.

You should not be eating the same whole grain (or any food for that matter) all of the time exactly because each food has its pros and cons (the cons are vastly outnumbered by the pros if you eat the good foods though)

Every dietitian tells you to vary your diet as much as possible. Your reply is moot because you are blindly considering 1 argument at a time while the guidelines paint a whole picture

Variety is good. But any dietician or guidelines who tells you to base your diet on grains should be ignored.

Says who?

If the meat in question is fish, that is pretty much the Japanese diet, and they are doing pretty well health-wise.

That is a dramatically healthier meal than very many American kids typically eat. Compare it to, say: a hotdog, a bag of potato chips, and a 20oz bottle of soda.

I really doubt if people actually ate the food guide pyramid they would be overweight. The problem is they still lace everything with that top part of fats, oils, and sweets. Cheetos are not the base of the pyramid. I don’t know anyone that is obese from eating whole grain breads, rice, and pasta. It’s not calorie dense until you start adding all the extras.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...

> he or she also consumes 36 pounds of cooking oils – more than three times as much as in the early 1970s.

> Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970.

If you ate lunch served by a public school then your diet was impacted by the food pyramid.

Well-meaning adults based what they gave kids on the food pyramid.

If that were true, and the food pyramid was this disaster, you'd expect the kids of the well-educated middle class to be fatter and the kids of parentally neglected kids to be thinner.

If it's not like that, probably other factors were a lot more important than the food pyramid.

It definitely contributed to the overall feeling or notion of what was considered healthy by non-nutritionists.

> I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.

And even if a huge number of Americans did robotically follow it that would not explain the obesity epidemic, because the obesity epidemic is worldwide.

The obesity epidemic varies widely by county.

But many countries that had a similar food pyramid are relatively thin, and some countries that are very obese never had one, so you're right that it's a poor explanation

I have to measure sugar level everyday, so I have rapid numerical feedback on my eating habits, that helps to nudge me to healthier choices.

For as much criticism as the food pyramid gets these days, you’d think today’s diet recommendations would be dramatically different. But they’re not. The food pyramid is still very close to the diets most dieticians in most developed countries recommend. There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it.

Most breakfast cereals have tons of sugars added. The top part of the food pyramid—the smallest area—is for foods with added sugars. The food pyramid never justified eating a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, though that seems to basically be what people accuse it of.

The bottom layer was literally called the "Bread, Cereal, Rice, & Pasta Group" and featured a picture of a bowl of processed breakfast cereal, among other things.

The top layer was "Fats, Oils, & Sweets" and had some white and yellow spots.

Maybe it wasn't supposed to be justifying that, but as an infographic that's what it was suggesting.

Exactly this. "Sweets" for most people meant deserts You can see a picture of the food pyramid the USDA used to use here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)

Telling people they should be having a lot of cereal and showing them a bowl of cereal (along with saltine crackers) is going to lead them to believe that's healthy. Especially in the 90's when "cereal" for almost everyone meant highly processed breakfast cereals with a lot of added sugars, and there was little awareness with how much sugar was being added to everything.

Telling people to eat a lot of whole grains is entirely different from telling people to eat a lot of, quote: "bread, cereal, rice and pasta."

> There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it.

I think it's because

1. Diet fads can be extremely lucrative

2. Stuff you put into your body touches on topics of purity and cleanliness, which have always been a big deal to us. Many religions have strong opinions on it, but it probably predates them.

3. Large interest groups do in fact organize to push their products as healthy, or at least less unhealthy. So there is some "conspiracy", both for and against carbs (and protein, and whatever).

The pyramid and the new myplate are created by the USDA. I’m not sure why the department of agriculture is providing nutrition information. So I do share in your skepticism. I think this should be CDC/NIH owned.

https://myplate-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/2020-1...

The current U.S. dietary guidelines for americans are quite sound but I am the only person I know who listens to them.

Honestly, anything is better than the complete lack of useful labelling we're stuck with in the US. I agree the approach of some counties is heavy-handed and too opinionated, but I'd rather that than the corporate-approved nonsense we print on our food.

“Have a 3-2-4-4 day.” Grains were at the end with a four, not eleven. ;-)

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