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Between personal finance and a basic understanding of nutrition works it’s unbelievable how poorly equipped the average adult is.

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It's not unbelievable, it's by design. The consumer economy depends on it

>a basic understanding of nutrition

There's a loooong history in the US of nutrition misinformation. A couple of examples:

  - The food pyramid.
  - Eating fat makes you fat, therefore sugary food being labeled as "fat free," implying healthy.

One thing to remember is that the original food policy guidelines were decidedly not what the industrial food procedures wanted. The policies you’re referring started with a mistake made by a Nixon-era task force responding to what was then seen as an obesity crisis, even though it was notably lower than now.

Here are some period news stories:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/08/18/...

There’s an especially interesting quote from one of the doctors involved:

> "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."

They were wrong on the salt for most people & cholesterol, but in general that’s not especially bad advice. The problem was that they didn’t think about how well people would follow any of this – taking away most of what makes food taste good, especially in the era before white Americans used spices - and especially how the manufactured food industry would take this as a massive growth opportunity and key qualifiers like switching to a higher ratio of complex carbohydrates were largely forgotten.

I've also read that the food pyramid was apt for the time since meat and whatnot was so expensive. They were trying to get enough calories in people.

The food pyramid has its origins not in recommendations for a balanced diet but in food shortages. The USDA released the Basic 7 food guide in 1943 to help U.S. citizens cope with food rationing during World War II.

https://www.britannica.com/science/food-pyramid

That was a huge shift indeed - when my grandmother took “Home Economics” it was all about having enough safely-cooked calories for manual laborers (Illinois where she grew up ran to farm and factory workers) and nobody could afford anything like the amount of meat or dairy we now eat. My grandfather used to eat beef a few times per year, when the cousins who had dairy cattle culled the herd.

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