The Food Pyramid is a Lie - Here's Why
I’m half-certain every kid born in the 2000s has this image floating around in the back of their brain. It’s like a sleeper agent lying in wait; something you forget about until you see it for the first time in a decade and all the terrible memories of elementary school P.E. class come flooding back. The musty room, the pacer test, your glasses falling off your face and having another kid step on them while everyone’s doing burpees; I’ve never forgiven you all these years Ryan, you wretch. I don’t CARE if you’re “sorry” or if it “was an accident”; I’ll take my revenge one of these days, just you wait.
Video here
But that’s enough reminiscing about the good old days, back before Big Brother took recess away from us. The food pyramid was absolutely everywhere when it came to healthy eating. That is, not because it was the best, but because it was a federal standard of sorts- officially recommended by the Department of Agriculture. And of course, as we all know, the government always has our best interests in mind.
How did we get here?
The earliest concept of a food pyramid dates back to around 1973, originating not in the U.S., but in Sweden. The basic outline is remarkably similar to the USDA’s version released nearly twenty years later, perhaps a sign of its influence. Each pyramid layer is almost directly parallel to a layer on the USDA pyramid, with the absence of the very top. But never-mind that, this diagram is just too vague! Sure, you know that you should consume some food more than others, but how much more? Someone really should fix this… if only a major world power with thousands of researchers of its disposal would devote its efforts to the common good.
The issues
And here we arrive at the first public version of the American food pyramid. At a first glance, it looks a good deal better than the first pyramid we saw. After all, they made a good deal of progress: they’ve given numbers for each group, separated fruit and vegetables, and even made a category for unhealthy food groups to limit intake. And yet, so many of these recommendations are so incredibly wrong it borders on malice. Let’s go through this pyramid from bottom to top to dissect what makes it so bad.
First off, the grain food group. Let’s get the obvious out of the way- there is no way you should be having six to eleven servings from this group. That’s about half of an entire bread loaf! This image also portrays all of these grains as equal, when that’s simply not the case; pasta, for instance, is far healthier than sugar-filled rice. However, perhaps the most insidious part of this part is what it doesn’t say. For all of the variety of grains that this pyramid shows, it makes no distinction in the bread that it depicts. This one decision makes every other error in this graph significantly worse, for one main reason: white bread is infinitely worse for you than wheat bread. White bread is processed, meaning much of the healthy fiber is removed and the sugars are amplified to enhance the taste. As such, unassuming families are likely to assume that all bread types are equally healthy, and destroy their own bodies as a result.
Moving on from that travesty, the next level up only really has one big issue. For some reason, the USDA decided to put potatoes in the vegetables section. Now, is this technically true? Yes, but that’s verging on “putting full tomatoes in a fruit salad” territory. Potatoes are incredibly dense in starches, very similar to the grains in the previous layer. They offer very little nutritional value and only add more sugars to a diet. Nobody is exactly advocating for french fries to be a part of a healthy diet.
Next up… this is going to be a big one. First off, some points to the pyramid- they are correct in putting meats near the top, and moving milk to the top is also a good decision. In fact, dairy is not actually that good for you- it’s highly sugar dense and you can get calcium from other sources. Unfortunately, the rest of this level fails to hold up to this level of scrutiny. First off, two to three servings of dairy is still pushing it; if a significant portion of the human population can’t even digest it, it’s probably not that vital. So, a bit misleading, but the pyramid’s lack of discretion towards its subject is most egregious in the protein section. The big problem here is that all of these protein sources are nowhere near equivalent in healthiness. Red meat and nuts are nowhere close to each other in healthiness, despite both providing protein. The majority of the images here are also animal products, which all contribute to cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart disease as a result. Would a little bit more specificity have really hurt?
Lastly, the very top. You would expect this to be the least controversial section, but somehow they even messed up something as simple as this. The reason behind this lies in its universal condemnation of fats, which is just bad dietary advice. While the word has a negative connotation, fats don’t actually make you fat; while some, like butter, are bad for you, many unsaturated fats (usually liquids) actually provide valuable functions to the body, making the act of shunning them more harmful than helpful. So really, this whole pyramid is just a trainwreck from start to finish.
Surely the fixed this right?
Are you kidding? Of course they didn’t. They chose to make it worse, obviously.
In 2005, USDA released a new food pyramid called MyPyramid, which ditched the pyramid tiers (seriously, why make it a pyramid then?) in favor of slivers corresponding to how much of each food group you should eat. I’m pretty sure you can see the problem here; they got rid of specific guidelines for healthy eating. Sure, they made a couple of changes for the better, but the grains and milk section is still way too big. Plus, now they’re actively endorsing white bread, which is, again, significantly worse for you than wheat bread. More than that, though, these pyramid sections are all difficult to tell apart in size- how much milk should you have compared to vegetables, for instance? I would say it’s “one step forward, two steps back”, but that implies them even mentioning the concept of exercise in these guidelines.
Of course, the USDA recognized these issues and used the careful criticism of dietary experts to thoroughly design a new food pyramid, which they then used as toilet paper and created MyPlate instead. I don’t think I even really need to say anything about this one, it’s so abstract and meaningless that there’s not even much that can BE said in the first place. So, instead, I’ll just say that the USDA’s food guidelines have close ties to both the grain and dairy lobby, which have pressured for their respective food groups to get increased sizes on nutrition recommendations. Chew on that one for a moment.
Okay, does anyone here ACTUALLY know what they're talking about?
Shockingly, yes! Harvard Medical School has a very thorough guide to a healthy nutritional lifestyle which many scholars consistently point to as one of the best in the field. Better yet, it actually gives usable information with the short blurbs attached to each section. And, unless Big Vegetable is actually behind the whole operation, the chart is free of corporate influence, providing the most well-rounded guide on the books. So, if you want a taste of a healthier lifestyle, maybe give this diet a try. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my dinner of Kit-Kats, chips, and white-hot festering rage. You’ve not got much longer for this Earth, Ryan.
Written By: Alex