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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

The food pyramid went away over twenty years ago. It was discontinued in 2005, and the current guidelines are at https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/myplate which launched in 2011.

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Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.

Then I would think the meat, dairy, and egg industry didn't get their money's worth. The My Plate guidelines have protein as less than 25% of the plate, and nothing says it has to be animal based.

The Court has actually ruled that the USDA violated federal law by hiding conflicts of interest in the Dietary Guidelines.

It is beyond insane that these are the official guidelines on what Americans should eat. Why would anyone defend them?

What do you find disagreeable about the My Plate that was linked?

I just told you: it's made by food industry interests and is ultimately divorced from actual nutrition science.

And I'm asking what would be different if you had to make a basic graphic based on nutritional science vs the My Plate graphic.

I wouldn’t reduce food to some stupid equational graphic. Instead I would work to try to regain trust by cracking the whip on these companies for once, whether it’s their prices, the quality of their products, their advertising, or all of the above. Our diets deserve more respect and that’s the reason RFK has an audience. He’s speaking to people who believe that. There can be better leaders than him, but at least he’s doing something!

Dairy is completely unnecessary, for one. Its prominence on the plate makes everything else immediately suspect. There are probably some axes along which a glass of milk or cup of (unsweetened) yogurt is one reasonable option but that's not what is being promoted here.

I see it as more of a limit than a requirement. After all, you can technically satisfy your dietary needs with vegetables and eliminate fruits. But we aren't talking about technicalities and edge cases, rather what a balanced diet might consist of. For many people that does include dairy and fruits, even if neither are completely necessary.

I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here, which has partly been formed by the dairy lobby over the course of every living American’s lifetime. While it is true that we are not the only culture that drinks cow’s milk, it is predominantly a Northern European and later American phenomenon, and the number of people who are intolerant to dairy on some level is very high. I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for.

"I’m not saying a balanced diet cannot consist of dairy, but implying it should, as the plate diagram does, is highly misleading and outright paid for."

And to exclude it would imply that it cannot be part of a balanced diet. That would be misleading based on the predominate culture.

"I would gently suggest that you may be blinded by a cultural bias here,"

I would suggest that you are not aware of the cultural background. The US was colonized by Europeans. Many cultures who immigrated also used milk, cheese, or other dairy products. It makes sense that the guidelines be based on the cultural background of the foods eaten in that country.

Also many Asian countries have nutrition guidelines that include dairy products, not to mention historical cultural foods that do include dairy.

How about critiquing the actual recommendation instead of the people?

I find Diary to be completely unnecessary and was paid for by the diary industry.

Absolutely. The human body was not meant to process the milk of other animals.

What was it meant to process? Why have some of us evolved tolerance for lactose?

Fruits, roots and vegetables. A tolerance for lactose is not an indication of optimal human food.

I mean, some animals have evolved to thrive in post Chernobyl disaster Pripyat. No other animal consumes the milk of another species of animal.

Yes, but I have distinct memories of these nutrition facts being taught to us in school for years, and our teachers asking us to report back how well we conformed to this supposed ideal diet as homework prior to any possible expectation that we children could be informed consumers.

Going through that link, it's hard to see where you came to that conclusion? It seems to have pretty reasonable dietary advice.

The food pyramid also seemed like pretty reasonable dietary advice until it wasn't. The skepticism expressed by other posters about where the guidelines originated from is well founded.

> Which are crafted by individuals with strong financial ties to the meat, dairy, or egg industries, thus should be disregarded by any reasonable person.

The RFK jr version of the food pyramid now moves meat and dairy to the biggest section of the pyramid

Even the myplate doesn't seem right. There's probably too much fruit and too much dairy. There isn't any indication of legumes. Vegetables is too vague. There is no indication of fats, which are part of everything else.

But prior to that it was pushed very hard in elementary schools. I remember performing in a school play that was all about the food pyramid and nutrition, in lockstep with the government propaganda at the time.

I just see one lobby, "Big Macronutrient". We all need to eat. I'll be worried when some company tries to make me eat actual plastic.

We know far less about any of this than we pretend to.

> eat actual plastic.

Foreseeing such Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg has already made that one into a movie.

I mean I've seen "low calorie bread" that was basically industrial bread cut with cellulose which is analogous to very fine sawdust.

Cellulose is one of the main constituant of plants and as a fiber, great for your gut:

> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.

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

Workshop sawdust would be a bad idea though.

I'm dubious about the idea that the cellulose additive is no different than eating plants. The forms that are used in food are refined / modified, i.e. not the same thing that I eat when I eat plants. I know a few people who react very badly to this added cellulose but don't have issues eating plants.

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